The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
(Die Auf zeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge)

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated from the German by William Needham

Contents
Book One
Book Two

BOOK ONE

September 11th, rue Toullier.

Here, then, is where people come to live; I'd have thought it more a
place to die in. I've been out. I've seen: hospitals. I saw a man reel
and fall. People gathered round him, which spared me the rest. I saw a
pregnant woman. She pushed herself heavily along beside a high warm
wall, sometimes touching it as if to make sure it was still there.
Yes, it was still there. And behind the wall? I looked on my map:
'Maison d 'Accouchement '* . Fine. They'll deliver her child; they're
able to do that. Further on, in rue Saint- Jacques , a large-sized
building with a cupola. The map gave: 'Val de Grace, hopital
militaire'. I didn't actually need to know that, but it does no harm.
The lane began to smell on all sides. It smelled, so far as I could
make out, partly of iodoform, partly of the grease from the pommes
frites, and partly of fear. All cities smell in summer. Then I saw a
house strangely blinded by cataracts. It was nowhere on my map, but
over the door and still quite legible were the words: 'Asyle de
nuit'**. Next to the entrance were the prices. I read them. It wasn't
expensive there.

*maternity hospital
**night shelter , dosshouse

And what else? A baby in a stationary pram: it was chubby, its face a
greenish hue, and on its forehead there was a definite rash which was
clearly healing and not painful. The child was asleep, its mouth open,
breathing iodoform, pommes frites, fear. That's just how it was. The
main thing was being alive. That was the main thing.

The fact is, I can't give up sleeping with the window open. Electric
tramcars with all their bells ringing rage through my room.
Automobiles drive across me. A door slams. Somewhere glass from a
broken window clatters to the ground. I can hear the big pieces
laughing and the little splinters sniggering. Then suddenly a dull
muffled sound from inside a house on the other side. Someone's coming
up the stairs. Coming, coming, on and on, is there for a long time,
goes past. Back in the street. A girl shrieks: 'Ah, tais-toi, je ne
veux plus! '* The tram, mad with excitement, races up, and across, and
away. Someone is calling. People are running, overtaking one another.
A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning there's even a cock
crowing, and what a boundless blessing it is. Then, abruptly, I fall
asleep .

*Ah, shut up. I've had enough!

Those are the noises. But here there's something that's more terrible:
the silence. I believe that sometimes when a great fire occurs you
can get a moment of extreme tension: the water jets slacken off, the
firemen no longer climb, nobody stirs. Soundlessly a black cornice
edges forward up above; and a high wall, behind which flames are
mounting, tilts, also without a sound. Everyone stands, shoulders
hunched, tense, with the part of their faces above the eyes pressed
into into furrows, waiting for the awful crash. That's how it is with
the silence here.

I'm learning to see. I don't know what it's about, but everything is
registering in me at a deeper level and doesn't stop where it used to.
There's a place within me that I wasn't aware of. What's going on
there I don't know.

I wrote a letter today and while I was writing it struck me that I've
been here barely three weeks. Three weeks elsewhere--say, in the
country--that could be like a day, here it's years. I'm definitely
not going to write any more letters. What's the point of telling
anyone that I'm changing? I haven't remained who I was, I'm different
from who I was before; so, clearly I have no friends or acguaintances .
And writing to strangers, to people who don't know me, is simply not
possible .

Did I say it before? I'm learning to see—yes, I'm making a start.
I'm still not good at it. But I want to make the most of my time.

For example, I've never actually wondered how many faces there are.
There are a great many people, but there are even more faces because
each person has several. There are those who wear one face for years
on end; naturally, it starts to wear, it gets dirty, it breaks at the
folds, it becomes stretched like gloves that are kept for travelling.
These are thrifty, simple people; they don't change their faces, and
never for once would they have them cleaned. It's good enough, they
maintain, and who can convince them otherwise? Admittedly, since they
have several faces, the guestion now arises: what do they do with the
others? They save them. They'll do for the children. There have even
been instances when dogs have gone out with them on. And why not? A
face is a face.

Other people change their faces one after the other with uncanny speed
and wear them out. At first it seems to them that they've enough to
last them forever, but before they're even forty they're down to the
last of them. Of course, there's a tragic side to it. They're not used
to looking after faces; their last one wore through in a week and has
holes in it and in many places it's as thin as paper; bit by bit the
bottom layer, the non-face, shows through and they go about wearing
that.

But that woman, that woman: bent forward with her head in her hands,
she'd completely fallen into herself. It was at the corner of rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs . I began to tread softly the moment I caught
sight of her. Poor people shouldn't be disturbed when they're deep
in thought. What they're searching for might still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness was bored with itself and it
pulled away the sounds of my footsteps and clattered around all over
the place with them like a wooden clog. Out of fright the woman reared
up too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two
hands. I could see it lying there, the hollowness of it's shape. It
cost me an indescribable effort to keep looking at those hands and not
at what they'd torn away from. I dreaded seeing the inside of a face,
but I was much more afraid of the exposed rawness of the head without
a face.

I'm afraid. One has to do something about fear once one has it. It
would be hideous to fall ill here, and were it to occur to anyone to
get me to the Hotel Dieu*, then I would undoubtedly die there. The
Hotel is pleasant and terrifically popular. One can scarcely get a
glimpse of the facade of Paris Cathedral without risking being run
over by one of the great number of vehicles that must needs go at top
speed into and across the open sguare. There are these little
omnibuses that are forever ringing their bells, and the Duke of Sagan
himself would have to let his carriage be halted if one of these
little people who was dying had taken it into their head that they
wanted to go straight to God's very own Hotel. The dying are stubborn,
and the whole of Paris comes to a halt when Madame Legrand, the
brocanteuse** from the rue des Martyrs, is driven to a certain square
in the Cite. A notable feature of these fiendish little carriages is
that they have frosted glass windows which are immensely stimulating
and one imagines the most marvellous agonies taking place behind
them--the imagination of a concierge could manage that--, and with a
more fanciful imagination and striking out in other directions clearly
there's no limit to one's conjectures. But I've also seen open
droschkes*** arriving, for hire, with their hoods folded back,
charging the normal rate: two francs per hour of death.

* 'hostel of God'

**second hand dealer

***simple horsedrawn carriage

This excellent hotel is very old. In the days of King Clovis people
were already dying here in what few beds there were. Now there are
559 beds to die in. It's natural mass-production. With such a high
number as that a single death doesn't get the same attention; however,
that isn't what matters. Quantity is what matters. Who today still
cares whether or not a death has been well put together? Nobody. Even
the rich who, after all, can afford to attend to the details of dying
are starting to grow slipshod and apathetic; the desire to have a
death all of one's own is becoming more and more infrequent. Only a
while and it'll become as rare as a life of one's own. God! it's all
there. God! It's all there waiting for us. We come along, we find a
life, ready-made, off the peg, and all we have to do is put it on.
You want to go, or you are forced to: 'No trouble at all, sir. Voila
votre mort, monsieur'*. You die as and when you die; you die the death
that belongs to the sickness you have (for all sicknesses are known;
what is also known is that the different fatal endings belong to the
sickness and not to the people who are sick; the sick person doesn't
have anything to do, in a manner of speaking) .

*There you are, sir, there's your death.

In sanatoriums, where people die so gladly and with so much gratitude
toward doctors and nurses, the death which is died is one that is
utilised by the institution; everyone approves. But when one dies
at home, the natural thing is to choose the sort of death they have
in the better circles of society, where the, as it were, first-class
funeral has already been introduced along with a whole train of
admirable customs. The poor stand in front of such a house and watch
until they've seen all they want to see. Their own death is, of
course, banal and without any sort of fuss at all. They're pleased if
they can find one that more or less fits--too big, well one can still
grow a bit; it's only if it doesn't meet across the chest or if it
chokes that something has to be done to it.

Whenever I think back to my home, where there's no one left now, I
can see that in times gone by things must have been different. In
those days people knew (or suspected) that they had death inside them
like the stone inside a fruit. Children had a small one in them and
grown-ups a big one. Women had it in their womb and men in their
chest. They had it and it gave them a particular dignity and quiet
pride .

My own grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, obviously carried a death
inside him. And what a death it was: two months long and so loud it
could be heard at the furthest corner of the estate. The long old
manor house was too small for this death; it seemed as if wings needed
building on to the hose because the Chamberlain's body was getting
bigger and bigger and he was forever demanding to be carried from one
room to another and got into a fearful temper if the day were still
not ended and there were no more rooms left for him to lie in. Up the
stairs the procession went, the menservants, maids, and the dogs that
he always had round him; the steward led the way and then brought them
into the room where his blessed mother had died, a room that was
exactly as she had left it twenty-three years before and which no one
since had been allowed to enter. Now the whole mob broke in. The
curtains were pulled back and the robust light of a summer afternoon
put all the shy, frightened objets to the test and clumsily turned
itself round in the wide-eyed mirrors. And the people did the very
same. There were lady's maids so consumed with curiosity they couldn't
tell exactly what their hands were searching after; there were young
servants gaping at everything, and elderly servant-folk walking around
trying to recall what tales they had been told about this locked room
in which now, at last, by good fortune, they found themselves.

It was the dogs that appeared to be the most affected; a room where
everything gave off a smell afforded them an immensely exciting
interlude. The tall, lean Afghan hounds occupied themselves running
back and forth behind the armchairs, making long dance-steps in their
swaying motion as they crossed the chamber, raising themselves on
their hind legs like heraldic dogs, resting their slender front paws
on the white gold window sill and with sharp, eager, furrowed faces
looked to the left and to the right down into the courtyard. Little
glove-yellow dachshunds had seated themselves on the wide,
silk-covered easy-chair by the window looking as if everything were
exactly as it should be, and a sullen-faced, wire-haired pointer
rubbed its back against the edge of a gilt-legged table causing the
Sevres cups on the painted top to tremble.

Yes, for the absent-minded overslept items in the room, it was
a dreadful time. At one point rose leaves, spilling from books that
had been hastily and clumsily opened, whirled to the floor and were
crushed underfoot; small, fragile articles were seized, instantly
broken and then guickly put back; quite a number of things that had
been bent were either stuck under curtains or even thrown behind the
gold mesh of the firescreen; and from time to time something fell,
fell with a muffled sound on to the carpet, fell with a bright sound
onto the hard parquet floor, but breaking to pieces here and there
with a sharp burst or an almost soundless one, for these things,
cosseted as they were, could not possibly withstand any kind of fall.

And had anyone thought to ask what might be the cause of it all, what
might have called down this glut of destruction upon this closely
guarded room, there would have been only one answer to give: death.

The death at Ulsgaard of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge. For he
it was who lay, bulging massively out of his dark blue uniform, in the
middle of the floor and did not stir. In his big strange face that no
one could recognise any more, the eyes were closed; he didn't see what
was happening. At first they'd tried to lay him on the bed, but he had
resisted, for he had hated beds ever since those first nights of the
last stage of illness. Also the bed here had proved too small, and
there was nothing left to do but to lay him on the carpet; for he
refused to be downstairs .

Christoph Detlev 's death had already been living at Ulsgaard for many
many days now, talking with everyone and demanded- -demanded to be
carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the little salon, demanded
the large drawing room, demanded the dogs, demanded that people laugh,
talk, play games and remain silent and all at the same time, demanded
to see friends, women, people who had died, demanded to die itself:
demanded, demanded, screaming.

For, when night had fallen and those among the overtired servants who
were not keeping watch were trying to go to sleep, Christoph Detlev's
death would scream and scream again and groan and roar for such a
length of time without stopping that the dogs, which at first had
joined in the howling, fell silent and didn't dare lie down but
remained standing on their long, slender, tembling legs, overcome
with fear. And when people in villages heard him roaring through the
vast Danish silvery summer night they got up as they did in thunder-
storms, dressing and remaining seated, not saying a word, round the
lamp until it was over. And the women who were close to giving birth
were moved to beds in the furthest rooms and in the tightest make-do
spaces; but they heard it, they heard it as if it were in their own
bodies, and they pleaded to be allowed to get up as well, and they
came, all large and white, and sat with the others with their blurred
faces . And the cows which were calving at the time were helpless and
unresponding and one calf together with all the mother cow's entrails
was dragged out dead because it totally refused to come. And everyone
did their daily work badly and forgot to bring in the hay because all
through each day they had had fears of the night; and because they
were so weary from lying awake and from getting up out of fear they
weren't able to think properly. And when on Sunday they entered the
white peaceful church they prayed that there might be no more lords of
the manor at Ulsguard for this one was dreadful. And what they were
all thinking and praying for was said aloud by the minister from up in
the pulpit, for he too no longer enjoyed restful nights and he could
not understand God. And the bell said it because it now had a fearsome
rival that boomed the whole night long and against which even with
every bit of it's metal making the peal it could do nothing. Yes, they
all said it, and one of the young men dreamed he had gone into the
castle and had struck the gracious lord dead with his pitchfork;
everyone was so resentful of the lord, so exasperated, so overwrought
that as they listened to his tale they looked at him, quite without
knowing, to see if he were possibly grown-up enough to carry out such
a deed. That is how people felt and talked all over the area where
just a few weeks previously the Chamberlain had been loved and pitied.
But although they talked in this way, nothing changed. Christov
Detlev's death was in residence at Ulsgaard and would not be hurried.
It had come for ten weeks and for ten weeks it stayed. And during this
time it was more the master than Christov Detlev Brigge had ever been;
it was like a king being known later, and going down in history, as:
' the Terrible ' .

It wasn't the death of somebody suffering from some kind of dropsy;
it was the evil regal death that the Chamberlain his whole life long
had carried inside him where it had fed. Every excess of pride, of
will and of dominance that he had not been able to use up himself on
his calm days had gone into his death, the death that now sat at
Ulsgaard squandering them.

What a look Chamberlain Brigge would have given to anyone who deman-
ded he die a different death from this one. His was a hard death.

And when I think of the others I have seen or heard of: it's always
the same. They've all had a death of their own. Those men who carried
it in their armour, shut inside it like a prisoner; those women who
grew very old and small and then on an immense bed like the ones on a
theatre stage, in front of the whole family, the servants and the dogs
discreetly and with dignity passed away. The children, even the really
small ones, didn't have just any child's death; they braced themselves
and died as who they were already and who they would have become.

And what a wistful beauty that gave to the women when they were preg-
nant and stood there with their slender hands restingly naturally on
the large shape where two fruits were: a child and a death. And that
tight, almost nourishing smile that took over their faces, didn't it
sometimes come from sensing that both were growing?

I've done something to keep fear away. I've sat up all night writing
and now I'm as tired as if I'd been on a long walk across the fields
at Ulsgaard. It's really hard for me to think that all of that is no
more; that strangers are living in the old long manor house. It's
possible that the maids are now asleep in the white room up in the
gable, sleeping their heavy, damp sleep from evening till morning.

And one has nobody and nothing and one travels the world with a trunk
and a crate of books and, in point of fact, without any curiosity.
What sort of life is that really: without house, without anything
passed down to me, without dogs? At the very least one should have
memories. But who has? Would that one's childhood were here now, it's
as if it's been buried. Perhaps one needs to be old to be able to have
contact with all that. I imagine it's good being old.

It was a beautiful autumn morning today. I strolled through the Tuil-
eries . Hung with mist like a light grey curtain everything eastwards
into the sun was bedazzling. The statues, grey against grey, basked
in the sunlight of the yet to be unveiled garden. Solitary flowers
in the long flower beds got up and said 'Red' in a frightened voice.
Then a very tall slim man came round the corner from the Champs-
Elysees; he carried a crutch, but it was no longer shoved under his
shoulder: he held it out in front of him, lightly, and now and then he
stood it on the ground firmly and loudly as if it were a herald's
staff. He couldn't suppress a joyful smile and smiled at everything
as he went by, including the sun, the trees. The way he walked was
like that of a shy child, but unusually light, full of memories of
walks in earlier times .

What a little moon like this can do to everything. There are days
when everything around one is softly illumined, not yet identifiable
in the bright air but nonetheless distinct. Even what lies nearest is
imbued with the tones of distance, is abstracted and only denoted,
not revealed; and what relates to distance: the river, the bridges,
the long streets and the squares squandering themselves among them are
what this expanse has collected behind it to be painted as if on silk.
It's not possible to tell what a light-green vehicle on the Pont-Neuf
can be, or a type of red that isn't too bold, or even a mere poster
on the fire wall of a pearl grey group of houses. All is simplified,
carelessly conveyed by a few light-coloured planes in like the face
in a Manet portrait. And nothing is negligible or superfluous. The
booksellers along the quai open up their cases, and the new or worn
yellow of the books, the violet brown of the volumes, the larger
green of a folder: all are attuned to one another, are valid, are
part of the whole and form a completeness which lacks nothing.

Down below me is the following assortment: a small handcart pushed by
a woman; on top and running the whole length a barrel organ;
crosswise on the other side a basketwoven cot in which quite a small
bonneted and gleeful infant with sturdy legs is standing and doesn't
like being made to sit. Now and again the woman turns the handle on
the organ. The little infant immediately stands up again in its basket
stamping, and a little girl in a green Sunday dress dances and taps
her tambourine up at the windows.

I think I ought to begin working on something now that I'm learning
to see. I'm twenty-eight and virtually nothing has happened. Let's
go back: I've written a study on Carpaccio, which is poor; a play
entitled 'Marriage', which seeks to prove something false by means
of ambiguities; and poems. Ah, but poems written early in life don't
amount to much. One should wait and gather meaning and sweetness a
whole life long--and as long a life as possible--then, at the very
end, one might possibly write ten lines that are any good. For poems
aren't, as people think, feelings (one has those early enough) ;

they're experiences. To write a single line of verse one must see many
cities, people, things, one must know animals, one must feel birds
flying and know the movements flowers make as they open up in the
morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unfamiliar
regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long
before; one must be able to think back to those days in one's
childhood that are still unexplained, to one's parents whom one could
not help offending when they brought a delightful gift and one didn't
appreciate it (it was a delight for someone else), to those childhood
illnesses which arose so peculiarly and with so many profound and
difficult changes, to those days in peaceful and secluded rooms, and
to those mornings by the sea, to the sea anywhere, to seas, to nights
of travel that swept along high above, flying with the stars; and it's
still not enough, even when one's allowed to think of everything one
can. One must have memories of many nights of love--no two nights the
same — of the cries of women in labour and of pale, white, sleeping
women who have given birth and are now closing again. But one must
also have been with the dying, one must have sat in a room with the
dead with the window open and random noises coming in. And having
memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be
able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they
return. For the memories are not what's essential. It's only when they
become blood within us, become our nameless looks and signs that are
no longer distinguishable from ourselves—not until then does it
happen that, in a very rare moment, the first word of a verse rises in
their midst and goes forth from among them.

All my poems came about in a different way; so they are not poems.
And when I wrote my play how mistaken I was. Was I an imitator and
fool to need a third person in order to tell of the fate of two people
who were making eachother's life difficult? How easily I fell into
the trap. And I should have known very well that this third person
who figures throughout all lives and literatures , this ghost of a third
person who has never existed, has no meaning, and must be disavowed.
He is one of the pretexts of a Nature which forever endeavours to
divert people's attention from her deepest secrets. He is the screen
behind which a play is acted out. He is the noise at the threshold of
the voiceless silence of a real conflict. One would think it had all
been too difficult till now for playwrights to speak of the two about
whom the action turns; the 'third', precisely because he is so unreal,
is the easy part of the task that they all can do. Right at the start
of their dramas one notices the impatience; they can hardly wait to
bring him on. The moment he's there everything is fine. But how boring
it is when he's late; there's absolutely nothing can happen without
him, everything comes slowly to a standstill, and waits. Yes, and
what if this jamming up and delay goes on? What, Mr . Playwright , and
you, the audience, who know the ways of the world, what if he had been
lost without trace, this popular rake, or this presumptuous young man
who fits every marriage like a skeleton key? What if, say, the devil
had gone off with him? Let's say that's what's happened. Suddenly one
becomes aware of the unreal emptiness of the theatres, they're walled
up like dangerous holes, only moths from the padded edging of the
loggia whirl down through the unstable hollow space. The playwrights
have to forgo the pleasure of living in an exclusive neighbourhood.
All public watchdogs search dutifully far and wide for that
irreplaceable third person who himself was the plot.

At the same time they're living among other people, not the 'third'
persons but the two, about whom such an incredible number of things
might be said and of whom not a word is ever spoken, though they
suffer and do things and don't know how to help eachother.

It's ludicrous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, 28 years of
age and known to no one. I sit here and am nothing. Nevertheless, this
nothing, five flights up on a grey Paris afternoon, begins to think
and it has these thoughts:

Is it possible, it thinks, that one still hasn't seen or recognised
or said anything that's real and important? Is it possible that there
have been thousands of years in which to look, to reflect, and to

record, and that these thousands of years have been allowed to go by
like a school break when one eats a sandwich and an apple?

Yes, it's possible.

Is it possible that despite inventions and advances, despite culture,
religion and worldly wisdom one has remained on the surface of life?
Is it possible that even this surface, which at any rate might, after
all, have been something, has been covered over with unbelievably
boring material so that it has the look of drawing-room furniture in
the summer holidays?

Yes, it's possible.

Is it possible that the whole of world history has been misunderstood?
Is it possible that the past is false because it's always its masses
that have been spoken about as if one were talking of a convergence
of many persons instead of talking about the one person they were
gathered round because he was a stranger and was dying?

Yes, it's possible.

Is it possible that one believed one had to catch up on what had
occurred before one was born? Is it possible that each and every
person had to remember that he had been produced by all that had gone
before and therefore knew it and would not let himself be persuaded by
others who knew otherwise?

Yes, it's possible.

Is it possible that all these people have a totally accurate knowledge
of what has never been? Is it possible that realities are as nothing
to them; that their life is draining away, connected with nothing,
like a clock in an empty room?

Yes, it's possible.

Is it possible that one can know nothing of the young girls who are
nevertheless living? Is it possible that one says 'women', 'children',
'boys' and not suspect for one moment (irrespective of their
education) that for a long time these words had no plural but only
countless singulars?

Yes, it's possible.

Is it possible that there are people who say 'God' and think it's
something they have in common with everyone?--And take a couple of
schoolboys: one of them buys a knife and the other buys an identical
one on the same day. And after a week they compare the two knives and
it turns out that they look only vaguely similar--so different have
they become in different hands. (There you are, says the mother of
one of them, if you will go and wear everything out straightaway .) --Ah
then: is it possible to believe that one could have a God and not use
him?

Yes, it's possible.

But if all this is possible and if even there's only a glimmer of
possibility , then, for pity's sake, surely something needs to be
done. The first person to come forward who has had these disquieting
thoughts must begin to do what has always been missed; he could be
just anyone and it doesn't matter in the least if he's not the most
suitable person: there's simply no one else to do it. This young,
insignificant foreigner, will have to sit himself down, five flights
up and write day and night: yes, he will have to write; that's what it
amounts to.

I must have been twelve at the time, thirteen at the most. My father
had taken me with him to Urnekloster. I don't know what prompted him

to go visit his father-in-law. The two men had not seen each other for
years ever since my mother died, and my father had never himself set
foot inside the old manor house to which Count Brahe had retired late
in life. I never saw this remarkable house again because when my
grandfather died it passed into strangers' hands. Thus, seeing it now,
in a version of my childhood memories, it's not a building, rather
it's all split up: a room here, a room there, and here a section of
passageway that doesn't link these two rooms but has simply been
preserved, a fragment. Similarly it's all scattered about within me,
-- the rooms, the staircases which opened onto the ground floor with
such great elaborateness and other narrow circular stairways in whose
darkness one travelled like blood through veins; the tower rooms, the
high balconies, the unexpected galleries one was urged along from the
little entrance door: --all that is still within me and will never
cease being within me. It's as if the image of this house had plunged
into me from an infinite height and smashed to pieces on the
foundation of my being.

What is preserved in its entirety in my heart, it seems to me, is
solely the dining-hall where we met for dinner every evening at seven.
I never saw that room by day; I can't even remember if it had any
windows or what they looked out on; each time the family entered the
candles would be burning in the heavy chandeliers and within a few
minutes one forgot the time of day and everything one had seen
outside. That high, and I presume vaulted, room was more impressive
than all the rest; its darkened height, with its never fully illumined
corners sucked all the images out of one without replacing them with
anything in particular. One sat there as if dissolved, wholly without
willpower, without consciousness, without interests, without
resistance. One was like an empty space. I remember that at first this
annihilating condition almost created a feeling of nausea in me which
I overcame by stretching out my leg until my foot touched my father's
knee opposite. It wasn't until later that I noticed that he seemed to
understand, or, at least, seemed to tolerate this odd behaviour, even
though in terms of the almost cool relationship existing between us
such a gesture was inexplicable. It was, however, that light touch
which gave me the strength to get through those long meals. And after
several weeks of desperate endurance, I, with a child's almost
boundless adaptability, had become so used to the eeriness of those
meetings that it no longer cost me any effort to sit at table for two
hours; now the time went by relatively quickly because I occupied
myself observing those present.

My grandfather called it 'the family' and I also heard the others use
this term, which was quite arbitrary. For although these four people
were distantly related to one another, they didn't belong together in
any way. My uncle who sat next to me was an old man whose hard tanned
face showed several black flecks, the results, I learned, of an
exploding charge of gunpowder; surly and malcontent as he was, he had
retired from the army at the rank of major and now carried out
alchemical experiments in some room in the house unknown to me and, so
I heard the servants say, was in contact with a gaol, which once or
twice a year sent corpses to him. Day and night behind a locked door
he would dissect them and prepare them in a mysterious way to resist
decomposition. Opposite him sat Miss Mathilde Brahe. She was a person
of uncertain age, a distant cousin of my mother's. Nothing was known
about her except that she kept up a very lively correspondence with
an Austrian spiritualist who called himself Baron Nolde and to whom
she was completely devoted, to the extent that she wouldn't undertake
even the slightest thing without soliciting his prior approval or
something after the style of a blessing. She was at that time
exceedingly stout, of a soft, lazy corpulence which, as it were, had
been poured casually into the loose, light-coloured dresses she wore;
her movements were weary and vague and her eyes were constantly
watering. All the same there was something about her that reminded me
of my gentle and slender mother. I found that the longer I looked at
her the more I could detect in her face all my mother's fine, soft
traits, which since her death I had never been able to remember
clearly; only now, seeing Mathilde Brahe daily, could I again know
what she who was now gone from me had looked like; in fact I possibly
knew it for the first time. Only now did the hundreds and hundreds of

details compose in my mind a memorial picture that accompanies me
everywhere. Later I realised that in Fraulein Brahe ' s face all the
details which characterised my mother's features were actually
there, --only now it was as if a stranger's face had pushed its way
between them forcing them apart so that they were distorted and no
longer linked to one another.

Next to this lady sat the little son of a cousin, a boy of about the
same age as me but smaller and weaker. His thin, pale neck rose from
a pleated ruff that disappeared beneath a long chin. His lips were
thin and tight shut; his nostrils quivered slightly; and of his
beautiful dark brown eyes only one could move. It sometimes looked
across towards me calmly and sadly, whereas the other one remained
constantly trained on the same corner of the room as if it had
already been sold off and would no longer come under consideration.

At the head of the table stood my grandfather's enormous armchair
which a servant with nothing else to do would push under him; in it
the old man occupied only a very small space. There were those who
addressed this imperious hard-of-hearing old gentleman as

'Excellency', while others gave him the title 'General'. And he most
certainly bore the stamp of these titles but it had been so long since
they had been conferred that the designations scarcely made sense any
more. At any rate it seemed to me that no definite name could be
attached to his personality which in some moments was so sharp and yet
at other times so diffuse. I could never bring myself to call him

'Grandfather', although occasionally he was friendly to me and now and
then would call me to him, trying to add a jocular touch to my name. I
should add that the whole family behaved towards the Count with an
evident mixture of awe and timidity; only little Erik enjoyed a
certain familiarity with the aged master of the house; his movable eye
threw quick assenting looks at his grandfather who just as quickly
returned them; and sometimes in the long afternoons one could see them
appearing at the far end of the long gallery, and then walking hand in
hand past the dark old portraits, not speaking a word but clearly
understanding each other in some other way.

I used to spend almost the whole day outside in the grounds and in
the beech woods or on the heath; luckily there were dogs at
Urnekloster and they would accompany me; here and there would be a
tenant's house or dairy farm where I could get milk and bread and
fruit, and I enjoyed my freedom in a fairly carefree way, at least in
the following weeks, without letting myself be worried by thoughts of
the evening gatherings. I spoke with hardly anyone for it was a joy to
me to be alone; now and then I would have a short conversation but
only with the dogs : I got on marvellously with them. Taciturnity, by
the way, was a sort of family trait; I was used to it in my father,
and it didn't surprise me that over dinner practically nothing was
said .

In the first few days following our arrival, however, Mathilde Brahe
proved herself to be exceedingly talkative. She questioned my father
about old acquaintances in foreign cities, she recalled odd
impressions, and she moved herself to tears thinking of female friends
who had died and of a certain young man who, she hinted, had been in
love with her, though she had chosen not to respond to his ardent
but hopeless affections.

My father listened politely, inclining his head now and then in
agreement and answering only when it was most necessary. The Count, at
the head of the table, smiled continually, his lips drawn down; his
face seemed larger than usual, as if he were wearing a mask. As it
happens, he would sometimes say a few words himself, addressing no one
in particular, in a voice that, though soft, could be heard throughout
the whole room. It had something of the monotonous regularity and
indifference of the workings of a clock about it; the surrounding
silence appeared to have an empty resonance all of its own, the same
for each syllable.

Count Brahe meant it as a special courtesy to my father when he spoke
of his late wife, my mother. He called her Countess Sibylle and all

his sentences ended as if he were asking after her. I felt--I don't
know why--as if he were referring to very a young girl dressed all in
white who at any moment might enter the room where we were. I also
heard him speak in the same tone about 'our little Anna Sophie' . And
one day when I asked about this young woman whom my grandfather seemed
so fond of I learnt that he meant the daughter of the Lord High
Chancellor Conrad Revenlow, the morganatic wife of Frederick IV whose
remains had rested at Roskilde for almost a century and a half. He had
no notion of the passage of time; death was a minor incident which he
ignored completely and those who were lodged in his memory continued
to exist and their dying altered nothing whatsoever. Several years
later, after the old man had died, he was described as having
maintained the stubborn notion that the future and the present were
one. He was said to have spoken on one occasion with a young wife
about her sons and in particular about the travels of one of them; the
old man talked endlessly and all the while the young lady, who was
just into the third month of her first pregnancy and sitting near him,
was almost fainting from horror and fear.

However, on one occasion it all began with my laughing. I just laughed
out loud and couldn't stop. It was one evening when Mathilde Brahe
didn't show up at dinner. When the old and almost totally blind
servant reached her place he, unaware, proffered the dish as usual.
For a short while he stayed like that, then when he judged it right he
moved along in his satisfied and dignified manner as if everything
were in order. I had watched this scene and in the short time it took
it didn't strike as being in the least comic. But a short while later
just as I was putting food in my mouth laughter rushed up into my head
with such speed that I swallowed the wrong way and caused great alarm.
And although I found this situation annoying, and although I did
everything possible to remain serious, my laughter carried on erupting
and kept me completely in its power.

My father, as if to blot out my behaviour asked in his full but low
voice: 'Is Mathilde unwell?' My grandfather gave one of his smiles
and then answered with a statement which I, being preoccupied with
myself, paid no attention to and which sounded like: 'No, she simply
doesn't want to meet Christine. ' I didn't take these words to be the
reason why my neighbour, the tan-faced major, got up and with a
mumbled apology and bowing directly towards the Count, left the room.
I did happen to notice that he turned round once more in the doorway
behind his host's back and by winks and nods signalled to little Erik
and to my utter astonishment to me also as if he were urging us to
follow him. I was so amazed that my laughter lost its grip on me. For
the rest, I paid no further attention to the major; I found him
unpleasant and I observed also that little Erik was taking no notice
of him.

As always the meal dragged on and on and just as we reached dessert
my eye was caught by something moving in the semi-darkness at the far
end of the hall. I thought the door there led to a mezzanine and was
always locked but little by little it had opened and with a feeling
of curiosity and dismay that was new to me I now fixed my eyes in
that direction and saw a slim lady in a light coloured dress step
into the shadow of the doorway and come slowly up towards us. I don't
know if I stirred or made a sound before the noise of a chair being
overturned forced me to tear my eyes away from the strange figure,
and I saw my father who had jumped to his feet and was now going
towards the lady, his face deathly pale and his hands clenched at his
sides. Meanwhile, quite undisturbed by the scene, she continued
towards us step by step and was already not far from where the Count
was seated when the latter suddenly stood up, grabbed my father by
the arm, pulled him back to the table and held on to him, while the
strange lady slowly and absently went across the space that had been
cleared, step by step through an indescribable silence in which only
a glass trembled and clinked and though a door in the opposite wall
of the hall disappeared. At that moment I noticed that it was little
Erik who with a deep bow closed the door behind the stranger.

I was the only one still sitting; I had sunk so heavily in my chair
it felt as if I would never be able to get up again by myself. For a

while I looked but my eyes wouldn't see. Then I remembered my father
and I became aware that the old man still held him by the arm. My
father's face was angry now, flushed with blood, but my grandfather,
whose fingers gripped my father's arm tightly like a white claw, was
smiling his mask-like smile. Then syllable by syllable I heard him
say something although I couldn't understand what his words meant.
Nevertherless they must have gone deep into my senses because about
two years ago I found them buried in my memory and I've been aware
of them ever since. He said: 'You are impetuous, Chamberlain, and
discourteous. Why don't you let people go about their business?'
'Who is it?' cried my father, interrupting .' Someone who has every
right to be here. No stranger. Christine Brahe . ' At that point there
arose once more that odd, rarefied silence and once more the glass
began to tremble. But my father then broke loose and dashed out of
the hall.

The whole night long I heard him going up and down in his room, for
I couldn't sleep either. But suddenly towards morning I awoke from
whatever passed for sleep and to my horror saw something white that
sat on my bed and froze me to the core. In my desperation I summoned
the strength to hide my head under the bedclothes and there from fear
and helplessness I began to weep. Suddenly it became cool and bright
above my tear-filled eyes; I squeezed them shut so I wouldn't have to
see anything through my tears . But the voice that now spoke to me from
very near came mildly and sweetly to my face, and I recognised it:
it was Mathilde ' s voice. I immediately calmed down and even when I
was already quite peaceful I let her continue comforting me; true,
I did find this kindness too feminine but I enjoyed it nevertheless
and thought I had somehow deserved it. 'Aunt', I said at last,
trying through my wet eyes to combine in her dissolved face the traits
of my mother: 'Aunt, who was the lady?'

'Ah', answered Miss Brahe with a sigh that seemed to me strangely
comical, 'an unfortunate woman, my child, an unfortunate woman.'

That same morning I noticed a number of servants busily packing. I
thought it would be for us and I found it quite natural that we were
leaving now. Maybe that was my father actually intended to do. I have
never got to know what induced him to stay on at Umelkloster after
that evening. But we didn't leave. We stayed on in that house a
further eight or nine weeks, enduring its oppressive peculiarities,
and we saw Christine Brahe on three more occasions.

At that time I knew nothing of her story. I didn't know that she had
died a long, long time before; it was while she was giving birth to
her second child, a boy, who grew up to meet a terrifying and cruel
fate,--I didn't know that she was a dead woman. But my father knew.
Had he, a man of passion and eager to be logical and clear-thinking,
wanted to force himself to endure this adventure without asking
questions? I could see, though I couldn't appreciate, how he struggled
with himself; I witnessed it without understanding how he finally won
through .

That was when we saw Christine Brahe for the last time. On that
occasion Miss Mathilde appeared at dinner; she was not her former
self. As in the first days following our arrival she talked
incessantly with no discernible thread and for ever getting herself
into a muddle, and at the same time some physical unease in her
compelled her to be constantly adjusting her hair or her dress , --until
without warning she jumped up and with a shrill wail disappeared.

At that same moment I instinctively turned my gaze towards a certain
door, and sure enough: Christine Brahe entered. Beside me the Major
gave a vigorous jerk that transferred into my body, but clearly he
no longer had the strength to stand up. His old, tanned, speckled
face turned from one person to another, his mouth hung open and his
tongue moved about behind his decayed teeth; then all at once his
face was gone, and his grey head lay on the table, and his arms lay
over and under it as if in chunks, and from somewhere a withered,
speckled hand emerged, trembling. And now Christine Brahe went past,
step by step, moving slowly like an invalid through an indescribable

silence broken only by a solitary whimpering sound like that of an
old dog.

But then, to the left of the large silver swan filled with daffodils
the large mask of the old man with its grey smile thrust forward. He
raised his wine glass towards my father. And now, just as Christine
Brahe was coming across behind his chair, I saw my father reach for
his glass and lift it a handsbreadth above the table as if it were
something very heavy. And that very same night we went on our way.

Bibliotheque Nationale.
I am sitting here reading a poet. There are a great number of people
in the room but one doesn't notice them. They're inside the books.
Sometimes they move about in the pages like people turning over in
their sleep between two dreams. Ah, how good it is being among people
who are reading. Why aren't they always like this? You can go up to
one of them and gently touch him: he doesn't feel a thing. And if,
when you stand up you bump against someone next to you and you
apologise, he gives a nod towards where he hears your voice coming
from, his face turns towards you and he doesn't see you, and his hair
is like the hair of someone asleep. How good that feels. And I am
sitting here and I have a poet. What a fate. There are now perhaps
three hundred people in the room, all reading; but it's impossible
that every single one of them has a poet. (God knows what they have.)
There aren't three hundred poets. But see what sort of fate I have: I,
probably the most beggarly of these readers, a foreigner: I have a
poet. Even though I am poor. Even though the suit I use everyday is
starting to show signs of wear at certain places. Even though the
state of my shoes might cause comment of one sort or another. True, my
collar is clean, as is my underwear, and I could, just as I am, walk
into any cafe you like, possibly on the finer boulevards and without
hesitating stretch out my hand and help myself to any cake or pastry
from the platter. It would raise no eyebrows, I wouldn't be told off
and thrown out, because at least it's a gentleman's hand, a hand
that's washed four to five times a day. Yes, indeed, there's no dirt
under my fingernails, no ink stains on my forefinger and, of special
note, my wrists are flawless. It's a well-known fact that poor people
don't wash as far up as that. Certain conclusions then can be drawn
from the cleanness of my wrists . And people draw them. They draw them
in shops. Even so, there are still a few individuals on the Boulevard
Saint-Michel for example and in the rue Racine who are not ones to be
misled and couldn't care less about my wrists. They take one look at
me and they know. They know that I'm actually one of them, that I'm
only putting on a bit of an act. It's carnival time. And they don't
want to spoil my fun; so they just grin a little and wink. No one has
seen them do it. The rest of the time they treat me as a gentleman.
There only needs to be someone else close by for them to even act like
servants. They act as if I were wearing a fur coat with my carriage
following behind. Sometimes I'll give them two sous, trembling lest
they reject them, but they accept them. And all would have been fine
if they hadn't persisted with a little of their grinning and winking.
Who are these people? What do they want from me? Are they lying in
wait? What do they recognise in me? Admittedly, my beard looks a
trifle neglected, in a quite, quite less than small way it resembles
their sickly, old faded beards that have always impressed me. But
don't I have the right to neglect my beard? Many busy men do, and it
doesn't occur to anyone to group them with the outcasts as a
consequence. For it's clear to me that outcasts is what they are; no,
not actually beggars, a distinction must be made. They are human
garbage, empty husks that Fate has spat out out. Moist with the
spittle of Fate they stick to a wall, a lamp-post, advertising
pillars, or are gradually sluiced down the alleyway leaving a dark,
dirty trail behind them. What in the world did that old woman want of
me, the woman who had crawled out of some hole carrying a drawer from
a bedside table with a few buttons and needles rolling around in it?
What was her reason for always walking alongside me, watching me? As
if she were trying to recognise me with her watery eyes that looked as
if a sick person had spat green phlegm at her bloody eyelids. And then
how did that small grey-haired woman come to be standing beside me for

a quarter of an hour in front of a shop window, showing me an old,
long pencil being pushed with interminable slowness up through her
clenched, putrid hands? I pretended to be looking at the window
display and not to have seen anything. But she knew I'd seen her, she
knew I was standing wondering what she might be doing. I knew full
well that it had nothing to do with the pencil: I got the feeling it
was a sign, a sign for the initiated, a sign that outcasts knew; my
guess was that she was meaning me to go somewhere or do something. And
the strangest thing was that all the time I couldn't get rid of the
feeling that there might actually be a certain understanding between
us, that this sign related to it, and that this scene was all part and
parcel of what I should have been expecting.

That was two weeks ago. But now hardly a day has passed without some
similar encounter. Not only at dusk, it happens at midday in the most
crowded streets: suddenly a little man or an old woman will appear,
they'll nod, show me something, and then disappear again as if
everything necessary has been done. It's possible that one of these
days they'll take it into their heads to come as far as my room, they
know precisely where I live and they'll set it up so that the
concierge doesn't stop them. But here, my friends, here I'm safe from
you. One needs a special card to enter this room. I have an advantage
over you in that I have one. As you can imagine, I walk through the
streets a little shyly; but eventually I stop in front of a glass
door, open it as if I were at home, show my card at the next door
(just the same as when you show me your things, the only difference
being that they understand me and know what I mean--) , and then I'm
amongst these books, taken from you as if I'd died, and am sitting
reading a poet. You don't know what that is, a poet?--Verlaine? . . .
Nothing? Nothing you can recall? No. You didn't single him out from
the others you knew? You don't make distinctions, I know. But it's a
different poet I'm reading, one who doesn't live in Paris, a different
one altogether. One whose has a quiet house in the mountains. He
sounds like a bell ringing in air that's pure. A happy poet who who
tells of his window and and of the glass doors of his bookcase which
mirror thoughts of a desolate vastness that is dear to him. This poet
is exactly what I would have wanted to become; for he knows so much
about girls and I too would have known a lot about them. He knows
about girls who lived a hundred years ago; it no longer matters that
they're dead, because he knows everything. And that's the main thing.
He pronounces their names, these soft, elegantly written names with
the old-fashioned loops in the long letters and the grown-up names of
their older female friends in which you can already hear the tiniest
echo of Fate, the tiniest echo of disappointment and death. Perhaps in
a compartment of his mahogany desk lie their faded letters and pages
loosened from their diaries giving dates of birthdays, summer
picnics, birthdays. Or it may be that in the pot-bellied chest of
drawers at the back of his bedroom there's a drawer in which their
spring dresses had been put away; white dresses worn for the first
time at Easter, dresses of dotted tulle which were really for summer,
but they couldn't wait. Oh, what a happy fate to sit in the quiet room
of an ancestral house with nothing but calm things that stayed in the
same place, and from outside in the bright green garden the first tom-
tits rehearsing their song in the light air, and the village clock in
the distance. To sit and gaze at a strip of warm afternoon sun and to
know a great amount about girls from the past and to be a poet. And to
think that I too might well have become a poet like him, that I'd
have been able to live anywhere, anywhere in the world, in one of the
many country houses that are closed up and nobody cares about. I'd
have needed just one room (the one under the gable that got plenty of
light) . Up there I'd have lived with my old things about me, the
family pictures, the books. And I'd have had an armchair and flowers
and dogs and a stout walking stick for stony paths. And nothing else.
Nothing except a book bound in yellowish, ivory-coloured leather with
end papers of an old flowered pattern: in it I'd have done my writing.
I'd have done a lot of writing because I'd have had many thoughts and
memories of so much.

But it hasn't worked out that way. God knows why. My old furniture is
rotting away in a barn where I was allowed store it, and as for
myself, yes, dear God, I haven't got a roof over me and the rain is

getting into my eyes .

Sometimes, in the rue de Seine for instance, I go past little shops.
Vendors of second-hand goods, or small-time antiquarian booksellers,
or dealers in engravings, all of them with overcrowded windows. No
one ever goes inside them, they don't look as if they do any business.
But look inside and you can see them sitting there and reading,
completely at ease, with no thought to the morrow, or of making a
success of things; they have a dog that sits cheerfully by their feet,
or a cat that makes the silence even greater as it brushes along the
rows of books as if it were wiping the names off the spines.

Ah, if only that would do: sometimes I could wish I could buy myself
a crowded shop-window like that and sit down behind it with a dog for
twenty years .

It's good saying it out loud: 'Nothing has happened. ' Once more:
'Nothing has happened. ' Does it help? The fact that my stove began
to smoke again and I had to go out isn't actually a disaster. And
the fact that I'm weary and feel I've caught a chill doesn't signify
anything. The fact that I've been wandering around the streets all
day long is my own fault. I could just as well have been sitting in
the Louvre. But no, I couldn't have done that. There are certain
people there who go to get themselves warm. They sit on the
velvetcovered benches with their feet looking like big empty boots
side by side in a row on the warm-air grating. They're thoroughly
decent people and when the attendants in dark uniforms and wearing
decorations leave them be, they're very grateful. But when I enter
they always grin. Grin and give little nods. The attendants in dark
uniforms and wearing decorations leave them be, they're very grateful.
But when I enter they always grin. Grin and give little nods. And then
when I go up and down in front of the paintings they always keep their
eye on me, always this all-eyes-swirled-into-one following me. It was
good then that I didn't go into the Louvre. I just kept on walking.
Heaven only knows how many towns, districts, cemeteries, and
passageways I've walked through, how many bridges I've crossed.
Somewhere I saw a man pushing a vegetable cart. He shouted:
'Choufleur, choufleur, ' pronouncing '--fleur' with a particularly
gloomy ' eu ' sound. Alongside him walked an ugly, angular-faced woman
who now and then gave him a nudge. And whenever she nudged him he
shouted. Sometimes he shouted of his own accord as well, but there was
no point doing so now because they were in front of a customer's house
and he had to shout anyway. Have I already said that he was blind? No?
Well, he was blind. He was blind and he shouted. I'm not being exactly
truthful when I put it like that. I've left out the cart he was
pushing. I'm pretending I didn't notice he was calling out
'Cauliflowers' . But is that essential? And even if it were, doesn't it
really come down to what it all meant to me? I saw an old man who was
blind and shouted. That's what I saw. Saw.

Will people believe there are houses like this? No, they'll say I'm
making it up. This time it's the truth, nothing left out, and, of
course, nothing added. Where am I supposed to get it from? People know
I'm poor. People know that. Houses? But, to be exact, they were houses
that were no longer there. Houses that had been demolished, top to
bottom. What was there were the other houses that had been standing
next to them, tall, neighbouring houses. Apparently they were in
danger of falling down because supporting them was a whole framework
of long tarred poles that had been rammed in at an angle from the
piled rubble on the ground to the exposed wall. I don't know if I've
already said that this is the wall I mean. But it was, as it were,
not the first wall of the existing houses (that should have been
understood) but the last wall of the earlier ones. You could see
inside them. On the different floors you could see walls with the
paper still sticking to them, and here and there signs of where floors

or ceilings had been fixed. Adjoining the inside walls and running the
whole width of the house was a dirty-white expanse of wall across
which crawled in unutterably disgusting, wormsmooth, bowel-like form
the open rust-flecked groove for the toilet pipe. There were grey
dusty marks at the edge of the ceiling where the gas pipe had been,
and they went this way and that before they suddenly turned right
round, ran to the painted wall and into a dark hole that had been
ruthlessly torn open there. What was most unforgettable, though, were
the walls themselves. The dogged life that had been lived in these
rooms refused to be obliterated. It was still there; it clung to the
nails that were left, it lingered on the remaining strip of floor-
boarding, it was huddled up under the little that was left of a corner
section .

You could see in the paintwork how, slowly, year by year, it had
changed blue into a mildewy green, green into grey, and yellow into
an old, stagnant, putrefying white. And it had actually got into
fresher-looking places behind mirrors, pictures and cupboards because
it had traced and retraced their outlines amid the spiders and dust
even in these hidden places that were now exposed. It was in every
patch where the paint had peeled off, it was in the damp pockets at
the bottom edges of the wallpaper, it swayed in the hanging shreds
and sweated from the nasty stains that went back ages. And from these
surfaces that had been blue, green and yellow and were now framed by
broken runs of demolished partition wall, arose the air from these
lives, this tenacious, shiftless, fuggy air that no wind had yet
dispersed. Lingering there were the midday meals and the illnesses,
the breathed out air and the years old smoke and the sweat that seeps
from the armpits and makes clothes heavy, and the stale breath from
mouths, and the boozy odour of fermenting feet. Lingering there were
the pungent smell of urine, the stinging smell of soot, the dull
steam-damp smell of potatoes, and the heavy, oily reek of old fat.
Also there was the sweet lingering smell of neglected breast-feeding
babies, and the smell of anxious children setting off to school, and
of the muggy beds of older lads. And a lot of the smells were those
that had come up from below out of the chasm of the street; they'd
evaporated; and others had dripped down in the rain which over cities
is not pure. And many had been brought here by the feeble, tamed
housewinds that always kept to the same street, and there were plenty
more that had come from goodness knows where. I did say, didn't I,
that all the outer walls had been demolished bar the last--? Now this
is the wall I've been talking about all this time. You might think I'd
be standing in front of it for ages, but I'm willing to swear that as
soon as I recognised the wall I took to my heels. Because it's the
fact that I recognised it that makes it horrible. I recognise
everything here; it passes into me without further ado; it finds a
home in me .

After all that I was somewhat wearied— you might say strained--which
is why I found it too much that he had to be still waiting for me.
He was waiting in the little cremerie* where I was hoping to have a
couple of boiled eggs; I was hungry, I'd gone the whole day without
getting myself anything to eat. And even now I couldn't get anything;
before the eggs were ready I was forced to go back out into the
streets and be buffeted by a whole turbid flow of people bearing
down on me . For it was the Shrovetide carnival and it was evening
and people had all the time in the world and floated about, rubbing
against one another. And their faces were full of the light that came
from the carnival booths and laughter welled up and poured from their
mouths like puss from an open sore. The more impatient I became trying
to move forward the more they laughed and crowded tightly together. A
woman's scarf somehow got caught on me; I pulled her along behind me
and people stopped me and and laughed and I felt that I should laugh
too but I couldn't. Somebody threw a handful of confetti into my eyes
and it stung like a whiplash. At the street-corners people were
tightly wedged in, crammed against one another and they couldn't make
any progress, just a gentle forward and back movement as if they were
copulating where they stood. But although they stayed where they were
and I ran like a madman along the side of the carriageway where there
were breaks in the crowd, the plain truth is that it was they who were

moving whereas I never left the spot. Nothing was changing; each time
I looked up I was made aware that the selfsame houses were still on
one side and the carnival booths were on the other. Perhaps we were
keeping to the same place and it was simply a dizziness in me and in
them that had made everything appear to be spinning. I had no time to
think about it, I was heavy with sweat and there was a stupefying pain
travelling round and round inside me as if something too big was being
propelled in my blood and it stretched my veins as it came along. And
at the same time I felt that the air had long since been used up and
that I was simply breathing in more exhaled out air that my lungs left
alone .

*basic restaurant

But all that's over now; I've survived. I'm sitting in my room near
the lamp; it's a bit cold because I daredn't try the stove. What if it
smoked and I had to go outside again? I'm sitting and thinking: if I
weren't poor I'd rent another room, one with furniture that's not so
outworn nor so full of former tenants as this is. At first it was
really hard for me to lay my head back in this easy-chair; there is,
you see, a certain greasy-grey hollow in its green cover that would
likely fit all heads . For a long time I took the precaution of laying
a handkerchief under my hair, but now I'm too weary to do it; I've
discovered that it's fine as it is and that the slight hollow is
exactly right for the back of my head, as if it had been made to
measure. But if I weren't poor the first thing I would buy for myself
would be a good stove and I would burn clean strong wood from the
mountains and not these miserable tetes de moineau* whose fumes have
such a frightful effect on your breathing and puts your head in a
spin. And then I would need someone to tidy the place without making a
din and to tend the fire in the same way I do, for often when I have
to kneel in front of the oven, riddling the ash with the skin on my
forehead all taut from being close to the glow of the embers, and
with the heat in my open eyes, I'm using up all the strength that I
need for the day so that if I then meet others they easily get the
better of me. Sometimes, if there was a large crowd around, I would
take a carriage and drive past, I would eat every day in a Duval...
and no longer creep into the cremeries ... Is he likely to have been
in a Duval? No. In there they wouldn't have let him wait for me. They
don't admit people who are dying. People dying? Right now I'm sitting
in my room; I can try calmly to reflect on what has happened to me.
It is good to leave nothing to uncertainty. So I walked in and at
first I saw only that the table where I often used to sit had been
taken by someone else. I nodded a greeting in the direction of the
little counter, ordered and sat down at a table nearby. But it was
then that I felt him, although he didn't move. Of all things, it was
his motionlessness that I felt and that I understood at once.
Communication between us was established and I knew that he was rigid
with terror. I knew that the terror had paralysed him, terror at
something that was happening inside him. Perhaps a blood vessel had
burst inside him, perhaps a poison that he had been afraid of for a
long time was right now entering a chamber of his heart, perhaps a
large abscess in his brain had risen like a sun and had changed his
whole world. With an indescribable effort I forced myself to look at
him because I still hoped it was all my imagination. But was happened
was that I jumped up and rushed out because I hadn't been mistaken. He
sat there in a thick black winter coat and his grey tense face was
sunk deep into a woollen scarf. His mouth was closed as if it been
shut with great force, but it wasn't possible to say if his eyes could
still see on account of the smoke-grey spectacle lenses that covered
them and trembled a little. His nostrils were torn open, and the long
hair covering his emptying temples looked wilted as if from too great
a heat. His ears were long and yellow with big shadows behind them.
Yes, he knew he was withdrawing himself from everything, not only from
human beings . One moment more and everything would be gone from his
mind and this table and this cup and the chair he was clinging to,
everything in his daily life, everything close to him would have
become unintelligible, foreign, difficult. So he sat there and waited
for it to have happened. And he offered no more resistance.

I'm still resisting. I'm still resisting although I know that my
heart has already been ripped out of me and is hanging there and,
even if my torturers now leave me alone, I can't go on living. I tell
myself: 'Nothing has happened' and yet I've only been able to
understand this man because there's also something working away inside
me and it ' s starting to draw me away and to separate me from
everything. How I always used to dread hearing people say of a dying
person that they were past recognising anyone. I'd imagine a lonely-
looking face that lifted itself out of the pillow, searching for
something familiar, something that had been seen for a moment but it
wasn't there. If my fear weren't so great I ' d be able to find
consolation in the thought that it's not impossible to see everything
differently and still live your life. But I'm frightened, I'm
unutterably frightened of this change. I haven't yet got used to being
in this world. Not at all. Though the world does look good to me. What
would I do in another one? I would so like to remain among the
meanings which have become dear to me, and if there were something
that really has to change I would want, at the very least, to be
allowed to live among dogs who have a world that is related to ours
and has the same things.

There's still time for me to write all that down and talk about it.
But there will come a time when my hand will be far from me and when
I then tell it to write, it will write words that are not mine. The
time of that other interpretation will dawn and not one word will be
left standing on another and every meaning will dissolve like clouds
and descend like rain. Despite all my fears I am yet like a man
standing in the presence of something great and I recall that
previously, before I began writing, it was often like this inside me.
But this time it is I who will be written about. I am the impression
that will be transformed. Oh it would only take a little for me to
understand it all and give it my assent. Just one step more and my
abject misery would become bliss. But I can't take this step. I've
fallen and I can't get up any more because I'm broken in pieces. I've
always gone on believing that help could come. Lying there in front of
me, in my own handwriting, is what I've prayed for evening after
evening. I made myself a copy from the books where I found it so that
it would be close by me and would have come from my hand as if the
words were my own. And now, kneeling here in front of my table, I want
to write them once more because this way it takes longer than when I
read them, and every word will last longer and will have time to die
away.

'Mecontent de tous et mecontent de moi, je voudrais bien me racheter
et m' enorgueillir un peu dans le silence et la solitude de la nuit .
Ames de ceux que j ' ai aimes, ames de ceux que j ' ai chantes, fortifiez-
moi, soutenez-moi , eloignez de moi le mensonge et les vapeurs
corruptrices du monde; et vous , Seigneur mon Dieu! accordez-moi la
grace de produire quelques beaux vers qui me prouvent a moi-meme que
je ne suis pas le dernier des hommes, que je ne suis pas inferieur a
ceux que je meprise.'*

*' Displeased with everyone, displeased with myself, I would like to
make amends and take some pride in myself in the silence and solitude
of the night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung,
strengthen me, sustain me, free me from the lies and corrupting
vapours of the world; and you, my Lord God, grant me the grace to
produce some fine verses that will prove to me that I am not the least
of men, that I am not inferior to those I despise. '

'They were children of fools, yea, children of base men:

they were viler than the earth.

And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword.

. . . they raise up against me the ways of their destruction . . .

... they set forward my calamity, they have no helper.
And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have
taken hold upon me.

My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no
rest .

By the great force of my disease is my garment changed: it bindeth me
about as the collar of my coat.

My bowels boiled, and rested not:

My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of

them that weep. '

My doctor didn't understand me. Not in any way whatsoever. It was
indeed difficult finding the right words . They wanted to try electric
shock treatment. Fine. I was given a note: I was to be at the
Salpetriere at one o'clock. I was there. I had to go along past
various huts and through several yards where here and there beneath
the bare trees people with white caps were standing looking like
convicts. Finally I entered a long, dark corridor-like room which
had four greenish frosted-glass windows on one side each separated
from the next by an expanse of black dividing wall. A wooden bench
ran along the wall facing and on this bench sat those who knew me and
were waiting for me. Yes, they were all there. When I'd got used to
the half-light in the room I noticed that among the people who were
sitting there shoulder to shoulder in an endless row there could have
been a few other people, lower class people: tradespeople, housemaids,
waggon drivers . Down at the narrow end of the corridor two fat women
had spread themselves out on special chairs and were chatting to each
other, concierges presumably. I looked at the clock; it was five
minutes to one. In five, let's say ten, minutes from now it would be
my turn, so it wasn't so bad. The air was stale, heavy, full of
clothing and breath. At one particular spot the strong, smell of ether
forced its way through a crack in a door leaving a chill as it rose. I
began pacing up and down. It struck me that I had actually been
directed here among these people, to this overcrowded public surgery.
It was, so to speak, the first official acknowledgement that I
belonged to the outcasts. Is that how the doctor had seen me? Yet when
I had visited him I had on a reasonably good suit and I had sent in my
card. Nevertheless he must have somehow found out. Or perhaps I'd
given myself away. That being the case, then, I didn't find it so
terrible. People were sitting quietly and paying no attention to me. A
few of them were in pain and to make it more bearable would give a
little swing sometimes to this leg sometimes to the other. A number of
men had lowered their heads onto the palms of their hands, others were
fast asleep, their faces weighted down with weariness. A fat man with
a red swollen neck sat there bent over staring at the floor, and now
and again spat with a sound like a slap at a stain as if it seemed
appropriate to him. A child was sobbing in a corner; it had brought
its long skinny legs up onto the bench and was now holding them in an
embrace, pressing tightly as if it had to say goodbye to them. A pale
little woman who wore on her hair a lopsided crepe hat trimmed with
round black flowers, had the grimace of a smile about her meagre lips,
but her sore eyelids were constantly brimming over. Not far from her
they'd placed a girl with a round smooth face and bulging eyes that
were devoid of any expression; her mouth hung open and one could see
the white slimy gums with their old stunted teeth. And there were
bandages everywhere. Bandages wrapped layer upon layer around the
whole head until only a single eye was there and it belonged to no
one. Bandages that hid and bandages that told you what was underneath.
Bandages that had been opened and in which now lay as if in a filthy
bed a hand that was no longer a hand; and protruding from the row a
leg that had been bound up as big as a whole man. I walked back and
forth and made an effort to be calm. I was much occupied by the wall
opposite. I noticed it had a number of single doors and that it didn't
reach the ceiling, so that this corridor wasn't entirely cut off from
the rooms that presumably lead off it. I looked at the clock. I'd been
walking up and down for an hour. A while later the doctors arrived.
First a couple of young ones with looks of indifference on their faces
went by, eventually the doctor whom I'd been to see came along wearing
light-coloured gloves, a chapeau a huit reflets* and an impeccable
greatcoat. When he saw me he tipped his hat and smiled absently. I now
hoped I'd be called straight away, but another hour went by. I can't
remember how I spent the time. It simply went by. An old man in a
soiled apron, some sort of orderly, came in and touched me on the
shoulder. I went into one of the siderooms. The doctor and the young
men were seated round a table. They looked at me. I was given a chair.
Fine. And now I was expected to tell them what exactly was the matter

with me. As briefly as possible, s ' il vous plait. Because the
gentlemen didn't have much time. I felt odd. The young men sat and
looked at me with that superior, professional curiosity that they'd
been taught. The doctor I knew stroked his black goatee and smiled
absently. I thought I would burst into tears but I heard myself say in
French: 'I have already had the honour, monsieur, of giving you all
the details that I'm able to give. If you consider it necessary that
these gentlemen be fully informed, then you are no doubt able,
following our conversation, to do that in a few words, while for me it
would be very difficult. ' The doctor stood up with a polite smile,
crossed with his assistants to the window and spoke a few words which
he accompanied with a horizontal rocking movement of his hand. Three
minutes later one of the young men, a short-sighted and nervous
fellow, returned to the table and said, trying to look sternly at me:
'You sleep well, sir?' 'No, badly. ' Whereupon he bounded back to the
group. They debated there for a time then the doctor turned to me and
advised me that I would be called. I reminded him that my appointment
had been for one o'clock. He smiled and made a guick fluttering
movement with his small white hands to indicate that he was
tremendously busy. So I went back into my corridor where the air had
become much more oppressive and began again to walk up and down though
I felt dead tired. Eventually the accumulated smells of dampness made
my head spin, I stood by the entrance door and opened it slightly. I
saw that outside it was still afternoon and there was some sun, and
that made me unspeakably happy. But I couldn't have been standing
there for a minute before I heard my name called. A female who was
sitting two steps away at a small table hissed something to me. Who
had told me to open the door? I said I couldn't stand the air inside.
Well, that was my affair, but the door had to be kept shut. Wouldn't
it be possible then to open a window? No, that was forbidden. I
decided to start walking up and down again, because it did eventually
produce a kind of numbing effect and it harmed no one. But now that
too displeased the woman at the table. Didn't I have a seat? No, I
hadn't. Wandering about was not permitted. I would have to find myself
a seat. There should still be one. The woman was right. Actually there
was one free next to the girl with the bulging eyes. I sat there this
time with the feeling that the situation I was in must definitely be
leading to something dreadful. On my left was the girl with the
rotting gums; whatever was on my right took me some time to make out.
There was an enormous immovable mass that had a face and a big heavy
lifeless hand. This side of the face was empty, completely without
features and without memories and what was uncanny was that his suit
was the sort they dress corpses in before putting them in a coffin.
The narrow black necktie was fastened round the collar in the usual
loose impersonal way, and one could tell that the jacket had been put
on this limp corpse by somebody else. The hand had been placed on the
trousers in the same position as this one here, and even the hair
looked as if it had been combed by the women who wash the corpses and
had been set stiffly like the hair on a stuffed animal. I oberved all
this very carefully and it occurred to me that this seat then was the
very one that had been destined for me, because I believed that now at
last I had arrived at that point in my life where I would remain.
Fate, indeed, moves in mysterious ways.

*stylish shiny top-hat

Suddenly there arose quite near me and in rapid succession the screams
of a terrified struggling child followed by a low restrained weeping.
While I was making an effort to find out where the screams could have
come from, once more there was a small suppressed scream, and I could
hear voices asking questions, and one, in an undertone, giving orders,
and then, regardlessly, some kind of machine started to hum and
continued without a care. It was then that I remembered that half-wall
and it was plain to me that it was all coming from the other side of
the doors and that people were working there. Indeed every so often
the orderly with the soiled apron appeared and beckoned. I no longer
gave any thought to it's possibly being me he had in mind. Was it
meant for me? No. Two men came along with a wheelchair; they lifted
the mass into it and now I saw that it was a lame old man and that the
other side of his face was smaller, worn down by life and had one eye
open that was dim and sorrowful. They took him into the other room

leaving plenty of vacant space near me. And I sat and wondered what
they probably intended to do the feeble-minded girl and whether or
not she too would scream. The machine behind the wall hummed away so
pleasantly in its mass-production kind of way that it wasn't
disturbing at all.

But then everything went quiet and in the quietness a superior self-
satisfied voice that I thought I knew said: 'Riez! ' A pause. 'Riez.
Mais riez, riez. '* I was already laughing. It was inexplicable why the
man in there didn't want to laugh. A machine started rattling and
immediately fell silent; words were exchanged, then again the same
energetic voice made itself heard and commanded: 'Dites-nous le mot:
avant.**' Spelling it out: ' a-v-a-n-t ' . Silence. 'On n'entend rien.
Encore une fois***: . . . '

*Laugh! . . . laugh. Come on laugh, laugh.
**Say the word 'before' for us.
***We can't hear. Say it again.

And then, while the warm and squishy babbling continued on the other
side, there, for the first time in many many years it was there again.
That: the Big Thing, which had shocked me with my first deep horror
when I was a child lying in bed with a fever. Yes, that's what I had
always called it whenever they were all standing round my bed, feeling
my pulse, and asking me what had scared me: the Big Thing. And
whenever they sent for the doctor and he came and persuaded me to
tell him, I would simply beg him to do everything he could so that the
Big Thing went away, nothing else mattered. But he was like the
others. He couldn't take it away, though I was small then and it would
have been easy to help me. And now it was here again. Later on it had
simply failed to appear, it hadn't come back not even during nights
when I'd had fever, but it was here now and I didn't have a fever. Now
it was here. Now it was growing out of me like a tumour, like a second
head, and was a part of me although it couldn't belong to me since it
was so big. It was there like a big dead animal that at one time, when
it was still living, had been my my hand or my arm. And my blood flowed
through me and through it, as through one and the same body. And my
heart must have been under a great strain pumping blood into the Big
One; there was hardly enough blood. And the blood, against its own
will, entered the Big Thing and came back sick and corrupted. But the
Big Thing swelled and grew before my face like a warm bluish boil and
grew before my mouth and across my remaining eye ran the edge of its
shadow.

I can't remember how I found my way through so many yards. It was
evening and I'd become lost in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. I walked
in one direction up boulevards that had wall after wall and when I
could see no end to them I walked back down in the opposite direction
as far as some square or other. There I began to walk along one street
and passed other streets that I'd never seen before, and still more of
them. Sometimes electric trams with their lights too bright raced up
raced past amid a harsh clanging of bells. But their destination signs
carried names I didn't know. I didn't know what city I was in or
whether I lived hereabouts, or what I had to do so that I wouldn't
have to do any more walking.

And now, once more, I've even got this illness that always affects me
so strangely. I'm sure it's taken too lightly. Just as the importance
of other illnesses is exaggerated. The illness doesn't have particular
characteristics, it takes on the characteristics of those it attacks.
With the assurance of a sleepwalker it extracts one's deepest dread,
which seemed a thing of the past, and sets it in front of one again
within the hour. Men who in their schooldays once attempted the
helpless vice, whose betrayed intimates are the poor hard hands of
boys, find themselves making another attempt; or an illness they had
overcome as a child starts up in them once more; or a habit they
thought had faded away, a certain turn of the head that was a
peculiarity of theirs years before, now returns. And with whatever it
is that comes along there also appears a whole tangle of confused
memories that hang from it like wet seaweed from some sunken thing.
Lives that you could never have heard of emerge from the depths and

blend in with what had really happened, and they oust the past that
you thought you knew; for in what rises is a new rested strength that
had always been there and is weary from too freguent remembering.

I'm lying in my bed five flights up and my day which nothing
interrupts is like a clock face without hands. Just as a thing that
has long been lost is found one morning back safe and sound where it
belongs and looking almost newer than it did at the time it went
missing just as if someone had been taking care of it--: so here and
here on my blanket lie things that were lost in my childhood and are
now like new. All my lost fears are here once more.

The fear that a small woollen thread sticking out of the hem of the
blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that
this little button on my nightshirt may be bigger than my head, big
and heavy; the fear that this breadcrumb now falling from my bed may
turn into glass and shatter when it meets the floor, and the
oppressive fear that when, in reality, it does then everything will be
broken into pieces, everything, forever; the fear that the margin
strip of a torn-open letter may be something that's forbidden, that no
one should be allowed to see, something indescribably precious, for
which there is no place in the room that could be safe enough; the
fear that if I were allowed to fall asleep, I might swallow the piece
of coal that's lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number
may begin to grow in my brain until it has no more room; the fear that
what I'm lying on may be granite, grey granite; the fear that I could
start screaming and people would flock to my door and eventually break
it open; the fear that I could give myself away and tell about all I'm
frightened of; and the fear that there's nothing I could say because
its all unsayable , --and the other fears... the fears.

I prayed for my childhood and it came back, and I feel it's still just
as difficult as it was at the time and that growing older has been of
no use to me whatsoever.

Yesterday my fever was better and this morning the day began like
spring, like spring in paintings. I'll try to go out to the
Bibliotheque Nationale to my poet whom I haven't read for such a long
time, and afterwards perhaps I can take a stroll through the gardens.
Perhaps there'll be wind across the big ponds where the water is so
real and children come to launch their boats with red sails and watch
them move through it .

Today I didn't expect it: I went out so bravely as if it were the
simplest and most natural thing to be doing. And yet there was
something that took hold of me as if I were made of paper and crumpled
me up and tossed me way; it was incredible.

Boulevard St-Michel was wide and empty and it was easy walking up
its gentle slope; casement windows overhead opened with a glassy sound
and their gleam flew across the street like a white bird. A carriage
with bright red wheels came by and further on there was someone
dressed in light-green. Horses, their harness flashing, trotted along
the dark, newly-sprayed, clean carriageway. The wind had got up,
fresh, mild; and everything was rising: smells, cries, bells.

I passed one of the cafes where in the evenings musicians performed,
made up as gypsies all in red. Creeping out of the open window with
a bad conscience came the bleary-eyed air that had been there all
night. Sleek-haired waiters were scrubbing in front of the door. One
of them stood bent over throwing handful after handful of yellowish
sand under the tables. A passer-by gave him a nudge and pointed down
the street. The waiter whose face was quite red looked keenly for a
couple of moments in that direction, then a laugh spread cross his
beardless cheeks as if it had been spilled on them. He signalled to
the other waiters and turned his laughing face quickly right and left
a few times to call everybody over without missing anything himself.
Now all of them were standing there looking and seeing or trying to
see, smiling or annoyed that they hadn't discovered what was so funny.

I felt a slight fear starting inside me. Something was pressing me to
go to the other side of the street, but I began to walk all the more
quickly and couldn't help glancing at the few people in front of me
though I didn't notice anything special about them. However I did see
that one of them, an errand boy with a blue apron on and an empty
basket over his shoulder, was gazing after someone. When he'd had
enough he turned on the spot towards the houses and signed to a
laughing clerk with a wafting movement across the forehead that
everyone is familiar with. Then his dark eyes flashed and he came
towards me satisfied and gently swaying.

I expected, as soon as I got a clear view, to see some unusual and
striking figure; but there appeared to be no one walking in front of
me except a tall lean man in a dark overcoat and wearing a soft black
hat on his short pale blond hair. I checked that there was nothing to
laugh at either in his clothes or in his behaviour and I was just
trying to look past him down the boulevard when he tripped over
something. Since I was following close behind him I took special care
when I came to the spot, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing.
We continued walking he and I, the distance between us never varying.
Now came a crossing and what happened was that the man in front of me,
made one leg shorter than the other and hopped down the steps from the
raised pavement the way children do when they happily hop or skip as
they go along. He got up onto the pavement on the other side simply
by taking one long step. But he was scarcely up there before he lifted
one leg up slightly and hopped on the other, once, quite high, and
straightway again and again. At this point you might well take this
sudden movement to be a trip or stumble if you persuaded yourself that
it had been some trifling item, a fruit stone, slippery peel,
something or other; and the strange thing was that the man himself
appeared to believe in the existence of an obstacle because he turned
round each time and looked towards the offending spot in that half-
annoyed, half reproachful way that some people do at such moments.
Once again something was shouting a warning to me to cross to the
other side of the street but I didn't follow it and carried on behind
this man directing all my attention to his legs. I must confess I felt
curiously relieved when for the distance of twenty paces the hopping
didn't recur; but as I raised my eyes I noticed that the man had
encountered a further annoyance. The collar of his overcoat had turned
upwards and though as he tussled first with one hand and then with
both to fold it back down, he had no success. That's what happened. It
didn't worry me. But straightaway to my boundless amazement I realised
that in the hands of this man there were two kinds of movement: the
one, furtive and swift with which he imperceptibly flipped the collar
up, the other a lengthy, as it were, persistent, exaggerated, spelled-
out movement which was supposed to effect a way of to folding it back
down. This observation confused me to such an extent that two minutes
passed before I recognised that in the man's neck, behind his hunched
up overcoat and the nervous hand actions was the same bi-syllabic
hopping that had quitted his legs only a short while ago. From this
moment I was bound to him. I could tell that this hopping was
wandering around in his body, that it was seeking here and there to
break out. I understood his fear of people, and I myself began
checking the passers-by to see if they had noticed anything. A cold
stabbing pain ran down my spine as his legs suddenly gave a little
twitching jump but no one had seen it and I imagined myself wanting to
do a little stumble, should anyone be taking notice. That would
certainly be a means of making those who were curious believe that
there really had been a small inconspicuous object on the pavement
that we had both happened to step on. But while I was pondering on how
I might help, he himself had found a new and excellent solution. I
forgot to say that he carried a walking cane. Now, it was an ordinary
one made of dark wood with a simple curved handle. And in his anxious
searching he had chanced on the idea of holding this cane first with
one hand (for who knows what the other hand might be needed for)
against his back right over the spine, pressing it firmly into the
small of his back, pushing the curved end inside his collar so that he
would feel it hard like a support behind his cervical vertebra and his
first dorsal vertebra. That was a posture that wasn't conspicuous; at
most a touch jaunty. It could be put down to the unexpected spring

day. It occurred to no one to turn round and look; now everything was
going fine. Admirably. Admittedly, at the end of the crossing two hops
came and went, two small half -suppressed hops that were of no account
and the one jump that was actually visible was so skillfully
appropriate (a hose was lying just there across the way) that there
was nothing to be afraid of. Yes, everything was still going well; now
and again the other hand too seized the cane and pressed it in more
firmly and immediately the danger was once more overcome. There was
nothing I could do, however, to prevent my anxiety growing. I knew
that all the time he was walking and making an incessant effort to
appear indifferent with his mind elsewhere, the terrible stabs of pain
were accumulating inside his body; in me there was also the same
anxiety that he felt with it growing and growing, and I saw how he
clutched the cane to him when the shaking began inside him. The
expression of his hands was so unrelenting and strong that I set all
my hope in his willpower that was bound to be great. But what did a
will count for here? The moment had come when his strength would be at
an end; that couldn't be long now. And I who followed him with my
heart beating strong lumped together as I do money what small amount
of strength remained with

me, and as I looked up at his hands I asked him if he would care to
take it if he needed it.

I think he took it; I couldn't help it not being more.

On Place St-Michel there were many vehicles; pedestrians hurried
to and fro. Often we were caught between two carriages and he would
then take a breath and slacken a little as if he were taking a rest
and there would be a little hopping and a little nodding. Perhaps that
was the ruse employed by the captive illness to subdue him. His will
had burst at a couple of places and the drop had left behind in his
obsessional muscles a gentle, alluring stimulation and a compelling
two-beat rhythm. But the cane was back in its place and the hands
looked vicious and angry; it was all going well as we started to cross
the bridge. Yes, going well. But then some unease came into his walk;
first he ran two steps and then he stood. Stood. His left hand gently
let go of the cane and rose so slowly that I could see it trembling
up in the air. He tipped his hat back a little and drew his hand
across his brow. He turned his head slightly and his uncomprehending
gaze rolled on across sky, houses, water, and then he gave in. The
cane was gone, he stretched out his arms as if he were wanting to fly
up high and there burst from him a natural energy that bent him
forward and pulled him back and made him nod and bow and flung dancing
energy out of him and into the crowd. For there were already a great
many people around him and I could no longer see him. What sense would
there have been in going anywhere? I was empty. Like a blank sheet of
paper I drifted along past the buildings and up the boulevard again.

[A draft of a letter:

I'm trying to write to you although there is actually nothing to say
after a necessary parting. I'm trying anyway. I think I have to do
this because I have seen the saint in the Pantheon, the lonely,
sainted woman and the roof and the door and, inside, the lamp with
its modest circle of light, and out there the sleeping city and the
river and the distance in the moonlight. The saint watches over the
sleeping city. I've wept. I've wept because it was all suddenly and
so unexpectedly there. I stood before it and wept. I couldn't help
it. I'm in Paris. The ones who hear this are pleased; most of them
envy me. They're right. It's a great city, great, full of
extraordinary temptations. For myself, I must admit that in certain
respects I've succumbed to these temptations. I don't think there's
any other way of saying it. I've succumbed to these temptations and
this has brought about certain changes, if not in my character then
assuredly in my view of the world, at any rate in my life. Under these
influences a completely different perception of all things has formed
in me, and there are now certain differences which, more than has been
the case in the past, separate me off from other people. A changed
world. A new life full of new meanings. At present I'm finding it
rather difficult, because everything is new. I'm a beginner in my own
relationships .

At some point might it be possible to go see the sea?

Yes, and just think: I was imagining that you could come. Would you
have possibly been able to tell me if there was a doctor there? I
forgot to find out about that. By the bye, I don't need that any more.

Do you remember Baudelaire's incredible poem ' Une Charogne ' ? Perhaps I
understand it now. Except for the last stanza he was in the right.
What should he do when that happened to him? It was his task to see
in this terrifying existent thing, repulsive only in appearance, that
which affects all existences. Choosing or refusing are out of the
question. Do you think that Flaubert came to write ' Saint- Julien
1 ' Hospitalier ' by chance? It seems to me that it hinges on whether or
not you can bring yourself to to lie beside a leper and to warm him
with the warmth of lovers ' nights because nothing other than good
can come of it .

Don't think for a moment that I'm suffering here from
disappointments--quite the reverse. Sometimes I'm surprised how
readily I gave up everything that was expected for what is real, even
if it's terrible.

My God, if only something of this could be shared. But would it then
exist? No, it comes only at the price of being on one's own.

The existence of the horrible in every atom of air. You breathe it in
without being able to see it, but it condenses inside you, becomes
hard, assumes pointed geometrical forms among your organs; for all the
torments and horrors that happened at places of execution, in torture
chambers, madhouses, operating rooms, under the arches of bridges in
late autumn: all this has a tenacious permanence which endures for its
own self and depends, jealous of everything else that exists, on its
own terrible reality. People would like to be able to forget much of
it but sleep runs its file softly over the furrows in their brains,
though dreams can drive sleep away and retrace the pattern. And they
wake up gasping and let the gleam of their candle dissolve in the
darkness and drink the half-bright reassurance as if it were sugared
water .

But oh on what a narrow ledge this reassurance stands. It needs only
the smallest change and once again the vision of what was familiar
and friendly goes beyond the outline that was so comforting only a
moment ago and can be seen more clearly to be an edge of terror. Be
on your guard against the light that makes space more hollow; don't
look round to see whether behind you, as you sit up, perhaps a shadow
is standing, like your master. Better, perhaps, if you had remained
in the darkness and your unconfined heart had tried to be the heavy
heart of all that is obscure. Now that you have pulled yourself
together you can watch yourself cease in your hands; from time to time
you can roughly sketch your own face. And inside you there is hardly
any space and it almost calms you to think that anything very large
can possibly be dwelling in those close confines, that even something
tremendous must accordingly reduce its size in order to become an
inner thing. But outside--outside there are no restraints, and when
it grows out there it grows inside you as well, not in the vessels
that are partly controlled by you or in the phlegm of your tranquil
organs; it expands in your capillaries, sucked upwards into the
outermost branches of your infinitely complex being. There it rises,
there it towers over you, higher than your breath where you have fled
as if to your last refuge. Ah, and where to then, where to then? Your
heart drives you out of yourself, your heart pursues you and you are
already almost outside yourself and can no longer get back in. Like a
beetle that has been trodden on you ooze out of yourself and your
little bit of outer hardness and adaptation are meaningless. night
without objects. windows dulled to the outside. doors carefully
closed. institutions passed on from time immemorial, believed in,
never quite understood. stillness on the staircase, stillness from
the adjoining rooms. Stillness high up on the ceiling. mother: the
one true you, you, who dealt with all this stillness back in my

childhood. You who took it all on yourself, saying 'Don't be afraid.
It ' s me ' . You who deep in the night had the courage to be this
stillness for the one who was afraid, who was dying of fear. You
stike a match and already the sound is you. And you hold it before you
and say: 'It's me. Don't be afraid. ' And slowly you put it down and
there is no doubt: it's you, you are the light that reveals the
familiar cherished things which are there for no other reason than
that they are good, plain, simple. And whenever there's a sound of
something in the wall, or on the floorboards, you simply smile, with
that clear smile that lights all around you into the scared face that
looks at you searchingly as if you knew all about the secrets. Is
there any power to match yours among the rulers of the earth? See--
kings lie and stare, and the storyteller cannot divert them. As they
lie blissfully close to the bosoms of their favourites, horror creeps
over them and makes them tremble and lose all desire. But you come and
keep the monstrosity behind you and completely blot it out, not like a
curtain that can lift up here and there. No, it's as if you had
overtaken it the moment the urgent call left my lips . As if you had
arrived well ahead of all that might happen and had behind you only
your hurrying here, your eternal pathway, the flight of your love.

The moulder of plaster casts whose shop I pass every day has hung two
masks by his door. One is the face of the young woman who had drowned;
they had taken a plaster cast of it in the morgue because it was
beautiful, because it was smiling, because the smiling was deceptive,
as if it knew. And lower down a man's knowing face*. This hard knot
of firmly tightened meanings. This relentless, self-intensifying music
that tried incessantly to condense and fall to earth. The countenance
of him whose hearing a god had sealed; so that there might be no sound
but his own, so that he wouldn't be swayed by sounds that were dulling
and invalid. He in whom sound was clear and enduring; so that only the
toneless senses might bring the world to him, silently, a tense world
waiting, unready, for the creation of sound.

*mask of Beethoven

World-perf ector : just as that which falls as rain over the land and
upon the waters, drops down carelessly, and by chance, and joyfully
heeding earthly laws again rises invisibly out of all things and rises
and hovers and form the heavens; so our precipitations rose out of you
and vaulted the earth with music. Your music: would that it were about
the world, not only about us . Would that a pianoforte had been built
for you in the Theban desert, and an angel had led you to that
solitary instrument through desert mountain ranges where lie kings,
courtesans, anchorites. He surely would have flung himself upwards out
of fear that you would begin.

And then you would have poured forth, Pourer-f orth, unheard, giving
back to the universe only what the universe can bear. Bedouin out
hunting would have galloped by in the distance, superstitiously; but
merchants would have flung themselves on the ground at the edges of
your music as if you were a storm. Only a few solitary lions would
have circle round you at night, afraid of themselves, menaced by their
own agitated blood.

For who will retrieve you now from lecherous ears, who will drive them
from the concert halls, the mercenaries with their sterile hearing
that whores and never once conceives? Semen sprays out and they stay
beneath it like prostitutes playing with it; or it falls like Onan ' s
semen among all of them while they lie there in their unachieved
gratification.

But, Master, if, somewhere, a virginal young man were to lay his
wakeful ear beside your music, he would die of bliss, or he would
carry infinity inside him and his fertilised brain would burst from
sheer birth.

I don't underestimate it. I know it takes courage. But let's suppose

for a moment that someone had it, this courage de luxe*, to follow
them in order to know once and for all (for who could forget it again
or confuse it with something else) where they creep off to afterwards
and what do they do with all the rest of their day, and if they sleep
at night. This especially should be ascertained: whether or not they
sleep. But it will need more than courage. For they don't come and go
like other people whom could be followed without any trouble at all.
They're here one moment and then gone, set down and then removed like
toy soldiers . The places where you find them are a little remote but
by no means hidden. The bushes give way, the path curves slightly
round the lawn; that's where they are with a huge amount of clear
space around them as if they were standing under a cloche roof. With
their small and altogether unassuming build, you might take these
inconspicuous men to be pensive walkers. But you are wrong. Do you
see the left hand, how it it ' s trying to get at something in the
slanted pocket of the old overcoat; how it finds it and takes it out
and holds the little item clumsily and conspicuously up in the air?
It doesn't take a minute before two or three birds appear , sparrows,
hopping closer out of curiosity. And if the man manages to meet their
very exact interpretation of immobility then there's no reason why
they shouldn't come even closer. Eventuallly the first one flies up
and whirls around nervously for a while level with the hand which is
holding out (God knows) the crumbs from a piece of old sweet bread
in its modest, manifestly sacrificial fingers. And the more people
gather around him, at the appropriate distance, of course, the less
he has in common with them. He stands there like a candle that's
burning down and shines from all that ' s left of the wick and is warm
and never flickers. And what the many small foolish birds can't work
out is how he calls to people and how he draws them to him. If there
were no onlookers and he was left standing there long enough, I'm sure
that all at once an angel would come and, overcoming any hesitancy,
eat a stale, cloying mouthful out of the withered hand. But now as
always there are people getting in the way of that. They see to it
that only birds come. They think that's ample and they claim that he
expects nothing else. What else should this rain-soaked doll expect,
stuck in the ground and leaning slightly like the ship's figurehead in
the little garden at home. Does it also come to be standing like this
because it had stood somewhere tilting towards its life, tilting to
get the greatest movement? Does it now look so washed out because at
one time it was painted in colours? Will you ask it?

*surfeit of courage

Only, don't ask the women anything when you see one feeding the
birds. You could even follow them; they do it as they go along; it
would be easy. But leave them. They don't know how it all came to be.
All of a sudden they have a lot of bread in their bag and from beneath
their thin shawls they take out large pieces that are moist from
having been chewed a little. It makes them happy to know that their
saliva is getting out into the world a little, that the little birds
can fly around with the aftertaste when they're just as likely to
forget it .

There I sat with your books, obstinate man*, and tried to think as
others do who don't let you be in one whole but have taken a portion
for themselves, one that satisfies them. For I still didn't understand
fame, this public destruction of something that's still forming, whose
worksite is broken into and stones are chucked about by the mob.

*Henrik Ibsen

Young man, wherever you are, there is something mounting in you that
will cause you to shudder. There's advantage in the fact that no one
knows you. And if those who think you are nothing contradict you,
and if those you kept company with abandon you, and if they want to
destroy you on account of your dear thoughts : what is this obvious
danger, which keeps you strong within, compared with the cunning
enmity of an approaching fame that will render you harmless by
scattering you all around.

Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. And, as time

goes on and you notice how your name is being spread around, don't
take it more seriously than anything else you hear from their mouths.
Think: it's become a bad name; get rid of it; take a different one;
any, so that God can call to you in the night. And hide it from
everyone .

Loneliest and most remote of men, how they have caught up with you by
your fame. How long ago is it when they were fundamentally opposed to
you. And now they go around with you as if as if you were like them.
And they take your words around with them in the cages of their
darkness and reveal them in public places and tease them a little out
of their safety. All your terrifying beasts of prey.

That was the first time I read what you had said, when the words
escaped and fell desperately upon me in my desert. As desperate as
you yourself were at the end, you whose path is still marked out
wrongly on every map.

Like a crack this hopeless hyperbola of your path crosses the heavens,
curving towards us only once before departing full of horror. What
was it to you if a wife stays or leaves, and if one man is in the grip
of vertigo and another of madness, and if the dead are alive and the
living appear dead: what was it to you? It was so natural for you;
you passed through as you would an antechamber and you didn't stop.
But you lingered there, bent over, inside that place where what
happens to us boils, condenses, and changes colour, inwardly. Further
inward than anyone had ever been before; a door had burst open in
front of you; now you were among the retorts lit by the fiery glow.
You never let anyone accompany you there, mistrustful one, you would
sit, noting distinctions between transitions.

And there— because revealing things was in your blood and not in how
you looked or in how you spoke--completely on your own you took the
immediate decision to magnify this tiny thing (that you had first
become aware of as you peered closely through the glass) in such a
way that it might be gigantic before all the thousands who saw it.
Your theatre came into being. You couldn't wait for this almost
spaceless life, compressed into drops by the centuries, to be
discovered by different skills and become liable eventually to be
stumbled upon by a few individuals who little by little come to share
the same realization and finally demand to see for themselves these
very grand rumours confirmed in a metaphor of the scene that they were
presented with. You couldn't wait for this; you were there and you had
to do what was hardly measurable: a feeling that rose about half a
degree, the angle of deflection that you read from close up of an
almost unencumbered will, the slight cloudiness in a drop of yearning
and this nil colour-change in an atom of confidence: that is what you
had to determine and keep known; for it was in such processes that
life now, our life, was lived, the life that had glided into us, that
had withdrawn so deeply inside us that it was scarcely possible any
longer to make conjectures about it.

As you were then, a timelessly tragic poet, committed to revelation,
you had to convert this capillary action at a stroke into the most
convincing gestures, into the things that were most present. So you
set about the unprecedentedly violent act of your work that more and
more impatiently and more and more desperately sought equivalents
among visible things for what you had seen inside. There was a rabbit
there, an attic, a large room where someone was pacing the floor, a
chink of glass in an adjoining room, a blaze outside the windows;
there was the sun. There was a church and a rocky valley that was like
a church. But that wasn't enough. Eventually towers had to be brought
in, and the whole mountain range, and avalanches that bury landscapes
and spill onto a stage cluttered with tangible things, for the sake of
things that were incomprehensible. There was no more you could do. The
two ends you had bent together shot apart, your crazy powers escaped
from your supple wand and your work came to nothing.

Who could otherwise understand why in the end, stubborn as you were,
you didn't want to leave the window? You wanted to see the passers-by,
for the thought had struck you that one day you might be able to make

something of them, if you could make your mind up to get started.

Then, for the first time I realized that there was nothing one could
say about a woman; I noticed that whenever they spoke of her there
was a lot they omitted: as with other people they would provide names,
descriptions, surroundings, places, objects, but they would, up to a
certain point, list all sorts of things that they'd always known about
her, and then stop softly and, so to speak, warily, as if they had come
to that tentatively sketched boundary that enclosed her. What was she
like? I would then ask. 'Blonde, a bit like you, ' they would say and
then start listing all sorts of things that they had always known
about her but they repeatedly failed to give any accurate description
of her; consequently I was unable by that means to picture her in my
mind any more. I was actually able to see her only when Mama told me
the story which I asked for again and again.

Every time she came to the scene with the dog invariably she would
then close her eyes, put her cold fingers to her temples and with a
kind of fervour frame between her hands a face that was shut off yet
completely aglow. 'I saw it, Malte, ' she would claim: 'I saw it. ' She
was already in her last years when I heard her say those words. It
was when she no longer wanted to see anyone, a period when she had
with her at all times, even when travelling, that little fine-meshed
silver strainer through which she filtered everything she drank. She
no longer took solid food, except, when she was alone, for biscuits
or bread which she would crumble and eat crumb by crumb the way
children eat crumbs . She was already obsessed by the fear of needles .
The excuse she gave to others was simply to say: 'There's nothing else
agrees with me any more, but that mustn't upset you. I feel
marvellous on that. ' She could suddenly turn towards me (for I had
grown a little bit) and with a smile that required a great effort from
her would say 'What an enormous amount of needles there are, Malte,
they're lying around in so many places, and when you think how easily
they fall out . . . She would check herself as if to make a joke of it
but the thought of all the badly fastened needles dropping down
anywhere and at any moment shook her with horror.

When she talked about Ingeborg, however, she was aware of nothing else
and was completely at ease: she spoke more loudly and she laughed when
she remembered Ingeborg 's laugh and that enabled one to see how
beautiful Ingeborg had been. 'She made us all happy, ' she said, 'your
father as well, Malte, literally happy. ' But when they said she was
going to die, she seemed only a little ill, and we all went around
hiding the fact. One day she sat up in bed and without thinking said
to herself, like someone who wants to hear how a thought sounds out
loud: 'You mustn't be so self-controlled; we all know what it is, and
I can reassure you things are as good as they can be, I wish for
nothing more. ' Just imagine; she said: 'I don't want to go on any
longer. '--she who made us all happy-- 'Will you come to understand that
someday, Malte, when you're grown up? Think about it later, perhaps it
will come into your mind. It would be good if there were someone who
understood such matters . '

'Such matters' occupied Mama's thoughts when she was alone, and she
was always alone during those last years. 'Of course I'll never solve
it, Malte, ' she would sometimes say with her characteristically bold
smile that wasn't for anyone to see, its purpose being wholly
fulfilled when it was smiled. 'But to think that no one ever feels
tempted to find it out. If I were a man, yes--particularly if I were a
man--I would think about it and in doing so I would follow proper
procedures and keep my thoughts orderly from the beginning. Because
there has to be a beginning, and if one could only grasp it it would
be something to be going on with. Ah, Malte, we pass away like this
and it seems to me that people are all distracted and preoccupied and
don't pay proper attention as we go along. It's as if a shooting star
were to fall and no one saw it and no one made a wish. Never forget to
wish for something, Malte. One should never give up wishing. I don't
believe there is any kind of fulfilment, but there are wishes that
last a long time, a whole lifetime, so that one can't possibly wait

long enough for fulfilment.'

Mama had had Ingeborg's little secretaire brought up and placed in
her room. I often found her in front of it, for I had her permission
to enter her room just as I wished. The sound of my footstep was
completely absorbed by the carpet but she felt my presence and held
out one of her hands to me across the other shoulder. This hand was
completely weightless and kissing it was almost like kissing the ivory
crucifix that was passed to me at night before I went to sleep. She
sat at this low secretaire, with its drop-leaf lid open as if she were
seated at a musical instrument. 'There is so much sunlight in it, ' she
said, and it was true, the interior was remarkably bright with its old
yellow lacquer on which flowers were painted, always a red one then a
blue one. And where there were three together there was a violet one
between them separating the other two. These colours and the green of
the narrow horizontal arabesque border were as dim as the background
was radiant, without actually being clear. This produced a strangely
subdued proportionality of tones as regards their unexpressed inner
affinities .

Mama pulled out the little drawers which were all empty. 'Ah, roses, '
she said, inclining slightly into the melancholy fragrance that had
not entirely disappeared. Regarding the secretaire she always imagined
that out of the blue something might still found suddenly in a secret
compartment that no one had thought of and that would open only by
pressing some kind of hidden spring. 'All of a sudden it will shoot
f orward--you ' 11 see, ' she said in a voice that was earnest and anxious
and she pulled hurriedly at all the drawers. But what papers had
actually remained in the compartments she had carefully put together
and locked them away without reading them. 'I wouldn't understand it,
Malte; it's bound to be too hard for me. ' It was her conviction that
everything would be too hard for her. 'In life there are no classes
for beginners; you're always required to do the most difficult things
straightaway.' People assured me that she had been like this only
since the terrible death of her sister, Countess Ollegaard Skeel, who
had been set alight before a ball standing in front of a candle-lit
mirror trying to rearrange the flowers in her hair. But of late it
was Ingeborg who seemed the most difficult to comprehend.

And now I will write down the story just as Mama used to tell it when
I asked her to. It was the middle of summer, on the Thursday following
Ingeborg's funeral. From that part of the terrace where we were having
tea one could see the gable of the family vault through the giant elm
trees. The table was laid out as if there had never been one person
more sitting there and we had also spread ourselves out quite a bit
round it. And we had each brought something with us, a book or a
workbasket, so that we were even a little cramped. Abelone (Mama's
youngest sister) was pouring the tea and handing it out, and we were
all busily handing round the tea things, except your grandfather who
was looking from his armchair towards the house. It was around the
time when the mail was expected to arrive, and it was most often
Ingebord who had brought it because she had to stay longer at the
house seeing to the arrangements for dinner. In the weeks she was
ill we had plenty of time to get out of the habit of expecting her
for we knew very well she couldn't come. But on that afternoon, Malte,
when she really could no longert come, she came. Perhaps we were to
blame; perhaps we called her. For I remember that all at once I was
sitting there making every effort to think what it could be that was
so different now. Suddenly I found it impossible to say what it was;
I had completely forgotten. I looked up and saw all the others turned
towards the house, not so much in a special and obvious way as in a
very calm and ordinary expectation. And I was about to-- (it makes me
feel cold thinking about it) but, God help me, I was just about to
say 'Where is . . . ? ' --when Cavalier shot from beneath the table, like
he always did, and ran to meet her. I saw it, Malte; I saw it. He ran
towards her even though she wasn't coming. We realised he was running
to meet her. Twice he looked round at us as if he were asking a ques-
tion, then he tore away towards her as always, Malte, just as he
always did and reached her; for he began to jump round and round,
Malte, round something that wasn't there and then up at her to lick
her, and up again. We heard him whimpering with joy, and from the way

he several times shot up in the air in quick succession, you might
well have thought his jumping was to hide her from us. But suddenly
there was a howl and he twisted himself away from his leap and fell
backwards in the air with a curious awkwardness and then lay stretched
out on the ground not moving at all. The servant came from the
opposite side of the house with the letters. For a moment he
hesitated. Obviously it was no easy thing to walk towards all our
faces. Besides, your father had already signalled to him to stay. Your
father, Malte, didn't like animals; nevertheless he went, slowly, it
seemed to me, over to where the dog lay and bent over it. He said
something to the servant, something short, monosyllabic. I saw how the
servant rushed forward to lift Cavalier up. But your father took hold
of the dog himself and carried it, as if he knew exactly to take it,
into the house.

Once, when she was recounting what had happened, it had grown almost
dark and I was on the point of asking Mama to tell us about the
'hand' : at that moment I could have done it myself. I was already
taking in breath to begin; but then it occurred to me how well I had
understood the servant's not being able to approach their faces. And I
was afraid, despite the darkness, of how Mama's face might look if it
had seen what I had seen. I swiftly took another breath so it might
appear as if that was all I had wanted to do. A few years later, after
the curious night in the gallery at Urnekloster, I went around for
days in the hope of confiding with Erik. But after our nocturnal
conversation he again completely shut himself off from me; he avoided
me; I believe he despised me. And it was precisely because of this I
wanted to tell him about the 'hand' . I imagined I would regain his
good opinion (and for some reason I desperately wanted this) if I
could get him to understand that I really had experienced it. But Erik
was so clever at keeping away from me that it never came about. And
then, a short time later, we left. So this, oddly enough, is the first
time I've told anyone (and after all, I'm doing it only for myself)
about an event that now lies far back in my childhood.

I can tell how small I was at the time by the fact that I was kneeling
on the armchair so that I could comfortably reach up to the table on
which I was drawing. It was evening in our apartment in town, in
winter, if I'm not mistaken. In my room the table stood between the
windows, and there was no lamp in the room other than the one that
shone on my pages and on Mademoiselle's book; for Mademoiselle was
sitting beside me, her chair set back a little, reading. She was lost
to the world when she was reading and I don't know if she was in her
book; she could read for hours on end; she seldom turned a page and
I had the impression that the pages kept getting fuller and fuller
before her eyes as she looked words onto them, certain words that she
needed that weren't there. That's how it seemed to me while I went on
drawing. I drew slowly without anything very definite in my mind and
whenever I was at a loss how to continue, I would look at what I'd
done, tilting my head a little to the right; that was the quickest way
for me to see what was still missing. There were officers on horseback
riding into battle, or were in the midst of it and that was much
simpler because all you needed to show was the smoke that engulfed
everything. Mama certainly maintained at the time that I painted only
islands--islands with large trees and a castle and a flight of steps
and along the shoreline flowers, meant to be be reflected in the
water. But I think she was making that up; or it must have been later.

What is certain is that on that evening I was sketching a knight, a
solitary, recognisable knight on a curiously clad horse. He needed
so many colours that I often had to change crayons, but red was the
one I favoured most and I kept reaching for it. Now I needed it once
more; it rolled (I can still see it) , it rolled diagonally across the
illumined page to the edge of the table and before I could prevent
anything it had gone past me and had disappeared. I needed it really
urgently and it was very annoying having to climb down after it.
Clumsy as I was it took rather a lot of organising to get down; my
legs seemed much too long, I couldn't get them out from under me; I
had been in a kneeling position too long and it had made my limbs
numb. I didn't know what was part of me and what was part of the
chair. Finally I did get down, somewhat befuddled, and found myself on

an animal skin that ran under the table and extended to the far wall.
But then a fresh difficulty arose. Accustomed to the brightness above
and still wholly excited by the colours on the white paper my eyes
could make nothing of what might be under the table and the blackness
seemed so final that I feared that I would knock against it. I relied
therefore on my sense of touch and, kneeling, and supported by my left
hand I combed with the other hand through the cool, shaggy rug which
felt so nice and friendly; but there was no trace of a pencil. I
imagined I was losing a great deal of time and was just about to call
Mademoiselle and ask her to hold the lamp for me when I noticed that
my involuntarily strained eyes bit by bit could make things out in the
darkness. I could already distinguish the wall at the back with its
light-coloured moulded skirting. The table legs helped me find my
direction. I recognised first of all my own outspread hand rather like
some aquatic creature moving down there all on its own searching the
area around. I watched it, I still recall, almost with curiosity; it
seemed to me as if it knew things I'd never taught it; as it groped
around down there so sure of itself making movements I'd never seen it
make. I followed its advance, it interested me; I was prepared for
anything. But how could I have been expected to make instant sense of
another hand coming to meet it out of the wall— a larger and unusually
thin hand such as I had never seen before. Searching in a similar
manner it approached from the other side and both of the outspread
hands moved blindly towards eachother. My curiosity was still not
satisfied but suddenly it ended and only horror was left. I I felt
that one of the hands belonged to me and that it was letting itself in
for something that could not be remedied. Summoning all the command
that I had over it I stopped it and pulled it palm down slowly back to
me without taking my eyes off the other one which continued with its
searching. I could see that it wasn't going to stop, and I can't say
how I managed to get up again. I sat very deep in the armchair, my
teeth were chattering and my face was so drained of blood it felt as
if the blue had left my eyes. 'Mademoiselle--', I wanted to say and
couldn't but she was shocked herself, she flung her book aside and
knelt beside the armchair and called my name. I think she shook me.
But I was completely conscious. I swallowed once or twice; for now I
wanted to tell her about it.

But how? I made an indescribable effort to pull myself together but
there was no way I could express myself well enough for someone to
understand. If there were words for an event such as this then I was
too small to know what they were. And suddenly I was gripped by the
fear that, notwithstanding my age, those words would be there all at
once and what appeared to me to be more dreadful than anything else
was then having to say them. To undergo once again what it had really
been like down there, or else to modify my account from the beginning;
to hear myself admitting it--no, I had no strength left for that.

It's imagination, of course, if I now claim that at the time I had
already felt that something had come into my life, directly into what
was mine, and that I would have to go round with it for ever and ever.
I can see myself lying in my little cot, not yet asleep and somehow
vaguely foreseeing that life would be like that: full of nothing but
very odd things that are meant for one person only and not to be
passed on. What is certain is that bit by bit a sad and heavy pride
arose in me. I imagined how one might go around full of inner things
and be silent. I experienced an impetuous sympathy towards grown-ups;
I admired them and resolved to tell them that I admired them. I
resolved to say so to Mademoiselle at the next opportunity.

And then along came one of those illnesses that was intent on showing
me that this wasn't my first personal experience. The fever dug around
in me and from the very depths brought to light experiences, images,
facts that I had no knowledge of; I lay there overwhelmed by my own
self and waited for the moment when I would be told to put all those
things back inside me precisely, layer by layer, row by row. I began,
but it grew under my hands, it baulked, it was much too much. Then I
was seized with rage and I chucked everything into me in heapfuls and
pressed it together, but I couldn't close myself again. And then I

screamed, half-open as I was, I screamed and screamed. And when I
began to look outside myself they had already been standing round my
bed for a long time, holding my hands, and there was a candle there
and their large shadows moved behind them. And my father ordered me to
say what the matter was. The order was delivered in a low friendly
voice but it was an order all the same. And he became impatient when I
didn't answer.

Mama never came at night--, or, rather, she came just the once. I had
been screaming and screaming. Mademoiselle had come and Sieversen, the
housekeeper, and George, the coachman; but it did no good. And so,
finally, they'd sent the coach for my parents who were at a great ball
at the residence of the Crown Prince, I believe. And all at once I
heard the coach coming into the courtyard and I became quiet and sat
up and looked towards the door. There was a faint swishing sound in
the adjoining rooms and Mama entered in her grand court-gown, of which
she was oblivious, and almost ran forward letting her white fur fall
behind her and took me in her bare arms . Amazed and delighted as never
before, I ran my hand over her hair and her small smooth face and the
cold jewels at her ears and the silk at the edge of her shoulders
which smelled of flowers . And we remained like that and wept tenderly
and kissed eachother until we felt that father was there and that we
had to separate. 'He has a high fever, ' I heard Mama say timidly and
father reached for my hand and counted my pulse. He was wearing the
uniform of the Master of the Hunt with its beautiful broad blue
watered-silk ribbon of the Order of the Elephant. 'What nonsense to
send for us , ' he said, speaking into the room without looking at me.
They had promised to go back if it was nothing serious. And serious it
was not. On my bed cover I found Mama's dance card and some white
camellias which I had never seen before and when I'd felt how cool
they were I placed them on my eyes.

When you have illnesses like that you find that afternoons drag on and
on. In the morning after a bad night you can always go back to sleep
and the next time you awake you think it's early but its afternoon,
and it stays afternoon and it doesn't stop being afternoon. So you lie
in the newly tidied bed and perhaps grow a little in your joints and
are too tired to imagine anything at all. As you might guess, the
taste of apple sauce lasted a long time if you somehow construed it
so, in spite of yourself, and let its clean tartness circulate instead
of thoughts . Later with your strength returned and with pillows behind
you propping you up you could sit and play with your soldiers; but
they topple over so easily on the slanting bed-tray and its always
all of them together; and you are not yet sufficiently back inside
life to begin all over again. Suddenly it was too much and you begged
them to take everything away as fast as they can and it was good to
see your two hands again a little bit further along the cleared
bedcover .

There were times when Mama came and read me fairy stories for half an
hour (for proper long readings there was Sieversen), but it wasn't on
account of the stories. For we agreed that we didn't like fairy
stories. We had a different idea about what was wonderful. We found
that what we marvelled at most was when everything went naturally. We
didn't think much of flying through the air. Fairies disapointed us;
as for transformations into something else we didn't expect more than
a very superficial change. Nevertheless we did read a little, so as to
appear occupied; we didn't appreciate it when anyone came in and we
had to explain what we were doing; with father especially we were
exaggeratedly frank.

Only when we were quite sure of not being disturbed and it was growing
dark outside it could happen that we would devote ourselves to
memories we had in common which seemed old to both of us. We smiled
over them for we had both since grown up. We were reminded that there
was a time when Mama wished I was a little girl and not this boy I now
decidedly was. Somehow I had guessed this and I had sometimes thought
of knocking at Mama's door in the afternoon Then, when she asked who
was there I would say I would happily cry from outside ' Sophie ' ,
making my little voice sound so dainty that it tickled my throat. And
when I entered (dressed in the little house-dress with the sleeves

rolled up that I wore anyway) I really was Sophie, Mama's little
Sophie, busying herself about the house, her hair plaited by Mama so
that there could be no mistaking her for that naughty Malte, should he
ever return. That would definitely not be welcome. His absence was as
agreeable to Mama as to Sophie, and their conversations (in which
Sophie always spoke in the same high-pitched voice) mainly consisted
in listing Malte ' s bad habits and complaining about him. 'Oh dear,
that Malte, ' Mama would sigh, and Sophie had lots of things to tell
regarding the misdeeds of boys in general; it was as if she knew heaps
of them.

In the midst of such reminiscences Mama would suddenly say: 'I would
love to know what has become of Sophie. ' The way things were, Malte,
of course, couldn't tell her anything. But when Mama suggested that
she was certainly dead, he would stubbornly contradict her and implore
her not to believe it even though there was little that could be
proved to the contrary.

When I think about it now I find it surprising that time and again I
managed to come back completely from the world land of these fevers
and find myself in an exceedingly communal way of life where each
person wanted the assurances of fellow-feeling with people one knew
and where one took great care with shared understandings . When
something was expected, it either came or it didn't; there was no
third posibility. There were things that were sad, sad once and for
all; there were pleasant things and a whole lot of things that were
incidental. And if a joy was in store for, one knew it was a joy and
that one had to behave accordingly. Basically it was all very simple
and once you understood that, it took care of itself. Absolutely
everything fell within these agreed boundaries: the long, monotonous
school hours when it was summer outside; the walks that one had to
talk about later in French; the visitors one was summoned to meet who
thought one comical, just when one was feeling sad, and laughed at one
as they would at the sorrowful expressions of certain birds which have
no other. And the birthdays, of course, to which were invited children
one hardly knew, embarrassed children who in turn made one
embarrassed, or the bold ones who scratched one's face and smashed
things one had just been presented with and then suddenly leave,
having emptied all boxes and drawers and left it all in piles. But
when one played by oneself, as was always the case with me, it could
happen that one unexpectedly stepped beyond this agreed and on the
whole harmless world and into a set of circumstances that were
completely different and in no way forseeable.

Mademoiselle was given to having migraine attacks which came with
tremendous severity; those were the days when I was hard to find. I
know that whenever father happened to ask for me, the coachman would
be sent into the park to look, and I wasn't there. From one of the
upper guest-rooms I could see him running out and calling my name at
the entrance to the long avenue. These guest rooms ran side by side
under the gables at Ulsgaard and as we only very seldom had house
guests these rooms almost always stood empty. Next to them was that
large corner room that had such a powerful attraction for me. There
was nothing inside apart from an old bust representing Admiral Juel, I
think, but the walls were lined all round with dark grey wardrobes,
with the result that the window had had to be installed in the vacant
whitened space above them. I had found a key in one of the wardrobe
doors and it fitted all the others. So, in a short time, I had
investigated every one: chamberlains' coats from the eighteenth
century, which were quite cold with their interwoven threads of silver
and the beautifully embroidered waistcoats that complemented them; the
official costume of the Order of Danneborg and Elephant Orders, so
rich and elaborate and the linings so soft to the touch that at first
you took them to be women's clothes. Then there were the real gowns,
each on its own, filled out by its hidden hoops and hanging there like
marionettes from some over-sized puppet show, so unquestionably out of
date, as if their absent heads were being used for something else. But
there were wardrobes that were dark when you opened them, dark with
uniforms which buttoned to the top and looked more worn than all the

others, as well as looking as if they actually wished they had not
been preserved.

No one will find it amazing that I pulled all of them out and leant
them into the light; that I held this one and that one to me or around
me; that I hurriedly put on a costume that could be my size more or
less and, curious and excited, I ran into the next guest room and
stood in front of the narrow pier-mirror made of assorted pieces of
green glass. Ah, how I trembled, being there; and how thrilling it was
to be trembling so. When something drew nearer out of the dimness more
slowly than me, the mirror didn't, so to speak, believe it and didn't
want, sleepy as it was, to repeat immediately what I had told it. But
in the end, of course, it had to. And what was there now was something
unexpected, unknown, something quite different from what I had
imagined, something sudden, independent; I swiftly ran my eye over it
to recognise myself a moment later, not without a certain irony which
came within a hairsbreadth of ruining all my pleasure. But if I began
to say things, to bow; if I walked away turning and giving myself a
vague kind of wave; if I also walked back in a lively and determined
fashion, then imagination was on my side for as long as I pleased.

That was the time I got to know the influence that can come directly
from a particular costume. No sooner had I donned one of them when I
was forced to admit that it had me in its power; that it dictated my
movements, the expression of my face, everything that came into my
mind. My hand that the lace cuff kept falling across was definitely
not my normal hand; it moved like an actor; I would say it even
watched itself moving, however exaggerated that sounds. In the
meantime all this feigning never went so far as to make me feel a
stranger to myself; on the contrary, the more variations I gave of
myself the more convinced of myself I became. I grew bolder and
bolder. I hurled myself higher and higher, for my skill in catching
myself was beyond all doubt. I didn't notice the temptation that was
growing rapidly in this self assurance. My undoing didn't come about
until the last wardrobe. I had never been able to open it before, but
one day the lock yielded, and in place of known outfits I was afforded
all sorts of things for masquerades. My cheeks flushed at the whole
phantastical idea. I couldn't begin to count all that was there. Apart
from a bautta* that I remember there were dominos in several colours,
there were ladies ' s skirts that gave a light tinkling sound from the
coins that were sewn onto them; there were pierrot costumes which
seemed silly to me, and pleated Turkish pants and Persian fezzes out
of which slipped small bags of camphor, and there were coronets with
stupid bland-looking stones. I rather despised all of this; it came
from such a feeble unreality and hung there so flayed, and
pathetically flopped together whenever they were dragged out into the
light. What threw me into a frenzy were the roomy cloaks, the scarves,
the veils, all those wide, unused, yielding fabrics that were so soft
and caressing or were so slippery I could hardly keep hold of them, or
so light they flew past me like a breeze, or were simply heavy
beneath their whole weight. In them I first saw possibilities that
were really free and infinitely variable: being a slave-girl about to
be sold, or Joan of Arc, or an old king, or a sorcerer, all of these
were now possible, especially since there were masks there as well,
large threatening or astonished faces with genuine beards and thick or
raised-high eyebrows. I had never seen masks befor, but I could tell
straightaway that masks should exist. I couldn't help laughing at the
thought that we had a dog that looked as if it wore one. I pictured
his warm eyes that always seemed to be looking out from behind and
into its own hairy face. I was still laughing as I put the clothes on
and I entirely forgot what I was supposed to be. Now this was new and
exciting, leaving my decision intil I was in front of the mirror. The
face I tied on had a curious hollow smell; it was a tight fit but I
was able to see through it comfortably, and it was only then I began
choosing all kinds of fabrics and winding them round my head in the
shape of a turban, so that the edge of the mask, which reached down
into an enormous yellow cloak, was almost covered over both on top and
at the sides. Finally, when I could add nothing more, I considered
myself amply disguised. I also seized a large staff and let it walk
beside me at arm's length and hauled myself thus into the guest room
and up to the mirror.

It was really magnificent, exceeding all expectations. The mirror
gave it back to me instantly, it was too convincing. It wouldn't have
been at all necessary to move much; the apparition was perfect, even
though it did nothing. But my aim was to learn what I really was, so I
turned myself round a little and finally lifted up both arms in large
movements like a sorcerer, which I immediately saw was the only right
thing to do. However, just at this solemn moment I heard, quite near
to me and muffled by my disguise, various noises sounding together; I
was very frightened; I lost sight of the Being over in the mirror and
I was badly upset when I became aware that I'd knocked over a small
round table with heaven knows what on it, probably very fragile
objects. I bent down as best I could and found my worst fears
confirmed; it looked as if everything had broken in two. The two
superfluous green-violet porcelain parrots were, of course, each in
its own spiteful way, smashed to pieces . Sweets had rolled out of a
jar and they had the silken look of pupating insects; the lid had been
flung some distance away; I could only see half of it, anyway, the
rest of it was nowhere to be seen. What annoyed me most, however, was
a perfume bottle that had smashed into a thousand tiny fragments and
from which had spurted the remains of some oldish essence or some such
resulting in the formation on the parquet floor of a stain shaped
like a very repulsive physiognomy. I dried itonly got darker and more
unpleasant. I was absolutely desperate. I got up and searched for
anything I could remedy the situation with. But there was nothing to
be found. Also I was so hampered in my seeing and moving that rage
mounted in me against the ridiculous state I was in: it was beyond my
comprehension. I tugged on everything but it only made my clothes
tighter. The strings of the cloak were strangling me and the stuff on
my head pressed down as if there were more and more of it. At the same
time the air had become muggy as if the o up quickly using something
or other that was hanging from me, but it oldish vapour from the
perfume bottle had misted things.

Hot and furious I dashed in front of the mirror and with some anxiety
on account of the mask I saw my hands working away. But that's just
what the mirror had wanted. Its moment of vengeance had come. While I
was straining, with an increasing feeling of restriction, to somehow
squeeze myself out of my disguise, the mirror compelled me, I don't
know what with, to look up and it dictated to me an image, no,
something real, an alien, incomprehensible, monstrous reality that
permeated me against my will, for now it was the stronger of us and I
was the mirror. I stared at this large, terrifying, unknown something
and it seemed incrediible that I was alone with it. But at the very
moment I thought the worst had happened: my mind emptied, I wasn't
there. For a second I had an indescribable achingly futile longing for
myself because there was then only himt, there was nothing but him.

I ran off but now it was he who was running. He bumped into everything.
He wasn't acquainted with the house, he didn't know where to go. He
tumbled down a flight of stairs, he fell over someone coming along the
passage who broke free screaming. A door opened, several people came
out. Ah how good to see recognisable faces. It was Sieversen, dear
kind Sieversen, and the chambermaid and the servant who looked after
the silverware; now things would be resolved. But they didn't leap
forward and save me; their cruelty knew no bounds. They stood there
and laughed; my God, they could stand there and laugh. I was crying
but the mask wouldn't let my tears escape, inside they ran across my
face and dried immediately, and ran again and dried. And eventually I
knelt down in front of them, as no one had ever done, I knelt and
lifted up my hands to them and implored them: 'Get me out, if you
still can and keep me with you, ' but they didn't hear; I had no voice
left.

To her dying day Sieversen would tell how I had sunk to the floor and
how they had gone on laughing thinking it was called for. They'd got
used to my ways. But then I just went on lying there and hadn't
answered. And the horror when they eventually discovered that I was
unconscious, lying there like one of the pieces of cloth, simply a
piece of cloth.

Time passed incredibly and all at once it was time again for Dr.
Jespersen, the Pastor, to be invited. It was a tedious and drawn out
breakfast for all concerned. Accustomed to the deep piety of the area
around, and of its deference to him, he was completely out place at
our house; you could say he was lying on dry land gasping. The gill-
breathing system he had developed in himself was labouring; bubbles
were showing and the whole business was not without its dangers. If
one wished to be exact, fabrics of conversation just weren't there;
they were remaindered at unbelievable prices : liguidation of all
stock. When he came to our house Dr. Jespersen had to limit himself to
being a kind of private individual, but that was exactly what he had
never been. He had been employed, as far back as he could remember, as
a soul expert. For him the soul was a public institution of which he
was a representative and he saw to it that he was never off duty, not
even in regard to his wife, 'his modest, faithful Rebecca, made
blessed by bearing children, ' as Lavater put it on a different
occasion .

[ Written on the margin of the MS :

Incidentally, concerning my father: his position in regard to God was
one of absolute correctness and faultless courtesy. In church it
sometimes seemed to me as if he were God's Master of the Hunt,
standing there patiently, and then bowing his head. On the other hand,
in Mama's eyes it was almost a violation that anyone's relationship to
God could be based on politeness. If her religion had had customs and
rituals that were clear and detailed it would have been bliss to her
to be on her knees for hours on end and to prostrate herself and make
the sign of the cross with large movements on and around her breast
and shoulders. She didn't actually teach me to pray, but it was a
comfort for her that I liked to kneel and put my hands together,
sometimes with my fingers interlaced, sometimes with my fingers
upright, whichever seemed to me to be particularly expressive. Quite a
bit of the time I was left in peace and early on I went through a
number of phases in my development which I didn't connect with God
until much later at a time when I was in despair; the connection was
made with such ferocity that it took shape and shattered almost at the
same instant. Clearly I needed to begin again right from the
beginning. And for this beginning I sometimes thought that I had need
of Mama, though it was better, of course to experience it alone. Also
by then she had been dead for a long time.]

Sitting across from Dr. Jespersen Mama could be almost boisterous. She
would repeatedy get into conversation with him which he took seriously
and when he then heard himself talking she reckoned she'd done enough
and suddenly forgot him, as if he'd already gone. 'How can he, ' she
said sometimes, 'drive around and go into people's homes just as they
were dying . '

He even came to her when that very occasion arose, but she was unable
to see. Her senses were giving way one after the other, starting with
her sight. It was in autumn, we should have been moving back to town,
but just then she fell ill, or rather, she immediately began to die,
slowly and drearily to wither over the the whole surface of her body.
The doctors came and on one particular day they were all there
together and were everywhere in the house. For a few hours it was as
if it belonged to the Privy Counsellor and his assistants and as if we
no longer had any say. But straightway after that they all lost
interest and only came one at a time as if out of simple courtesy, and
to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of port wine. And in the meantime
Mama died.

All we were waiting for was Mama's only brother, Count Christian
Brahe, who, it will be recalled, had for a while served in the Turkish
army, where he, we had always been given to understand, had gained
great distinction. He arrived one morning in the company of an exotic-
looking servant and I was astonished to see that he was taller than
my father and apparently older as well. The two men immediately
exchanged a few words, which, I assumed, related to Mama. There was a
pause. Then my father said, 'She is very disfigured. ' I didn't

understand this expression, but it made me shudder when I heard it. I
had the impression that my father also had had to steel himself before
he pronounced the words. But it in making this admission it was
probably his pride above all that suffered.

Not until several years later did I hear further talk of Count
Christian. It was at Urnekloster and it was from Mathilde Brahe who
was fond of speaking of him. I'm sure, however, that she rather
wilfully embellished the odd episode, for my uncle's life, which the
public and even our family got to know of only through rumours that he
never refuted, was entirely open to interpretation. Urnekloster is now
in his possession. But no one knows if he occupies it. Perhaps he's
still travelling as he used to; perhaps news of his death is on its
way here from some far flung part of the world, written by his foreign
servant in bad English or in some or other unknown tongue. Or perhaps
this man will give no sign of himself if one day he's left on his own.
Perhaps both of them disappeared long ago and are on the passenger
list of a missing ship under names that weren't their own.

I admit that at Urnekloster in those days whenever a coach drove up I
always expected to see him step out and my heart would beat in a
special kind of way. Mathilde Brahe maintained that that was how he
would come, that it would be so like him to suddenly be there when
when you least thought it likely. He never did come but my vivid
imagination was occupied with him for weeks; I had the feeling that we
owed it to each other to have a link between us and I would have loved
to know something of his true nature.

Meanwhile my interest soon shifted and as a result of certain events
it became wholly centred on Christine Brahe, though I didn't trouble
myself, oddly enough, to acquaint myself with her circumstances. On
the other hand I was worried by the thought as to whether or not there
was likely to be a picture of her in the gallery that I could look at.
And the desire to find out grew so obsessively and tormentingly that
for several nights I got no sleep, until, entirely unexpectedly, there
came the night when, God knows why, I got out of bed and went upstairs
with my candle, which appeared to be frightened.

For my part, I had no thought of fear. Anyway, I wasn't thinking, I
simply went. The high doors yielded so playfully before me and above
me; the rooms I went through kept themselves very quiet. And finally
from a waft from far below I noted that I'd entered the gallery. On
the right side I could feel the windows and the night; on the left had
to be the pictures. I lifted my candle as high as I could. Yes: there
were the pictures .

At first I set about looking only for women's portraits but then I
quickly spotted one and then another that resembled certain ones
hanging at Ulsgaard, and when I shone the light from below they moved
and wanted to come to it; it seemed heartless not to at least to wait.
Again and again there was Christian IV with his beautiful hair braided
en cadenette* against the slow curve of his cheek. There were women,
presumably his wives, of whom I only knew Kirstine Munk; and suddenly
Mistress Frau Ellen Marsvin was looking at me, wary in her widow's
attire and with the same string of pearls on the brim of her tall hat.
There were King Christian's children: ever new ones from new wives,
the 'incomparable' Eleonore on a white palfrey, in her most glittering
period before her affliction. The Gyldenl0ves: Hans Ulrik who the
women in Spain thought painted his face, so filled with blood was he,
and Ulrik Christian, once seen never forgotten. And almost all the
Ulf elds . And this one here with one eye painted over black could well
be Henrik Hoick, who at the age of thirty-three was Imperial Count and
Field Marshal, and it happened like this: on his way to the demoiselle
Hilleborg Krafse, it came to him in a dream that instead of a bride he
was given a naked sword and he took this to heart and turned back and
began his short, dauntless career that was brought to an end by the
plague. I knew them all. We also had at Ulsgaard the ambassadors to
the Congress of Nimwegen, who bore a slight resemblance to one another
because they had been painted all at the same time, each with the
thin, trimmed eyebrow of a moustache above the sensual, almost eye-like
mouth. That I recognised Duke Ulrich goes without saying, and Otte

Brahe and Claus Daa and Sten Rosensparre, the last of his line; for I
had seen paintings of them all in the great hall at Ulsgaard or had
found them portrayed in old folders of copper-plate engravings .

*strands of hair drawn back each side and

tied at the back of the neck.

But there many there I had never seen; and in all only few women, but
there were children. My arm had long since grown tired and was
trembling, but time and again I lifted the candle to look at the
children. I understood them, these little girls who carried a bird on
their hand and had forgotten it. Sometimes there was a small dog at
their feet, or a ball lying there and on the table next to them there
were fruits and flowers; and hanging on a column behind them, small
and just for the occasion, the coat of arms of the Grubbes or the
Billes or the Rosenkrantzes . So many things had been stationed round
them it was as if there was a great deal lot to compensate for. But
they simply stood there in their fine clothes and waited. I couldn't
help thinking about the women and about Christine Brahe, and I
wondered if I would recognise her.

I was about to run quickly right to the far end and look at them as I
walked back, but suddenly I bumped against something. I turned round
with such a start that Erik jumped back and whispered: 'Watch out with
that candle of yours . '

'You here?' I said breathlessly, and I couldn't make out whether this
was a good thing for me or a very bad one. He just laughed and I had
no notion of what to do next. My candle fickered and I couldn't
rightly make out the expression on his face. Most probably his being
there didn't bode at all well. But then, drawing closer he said: 'Her
picture isn't here; we're still looking for it upstairs. ' Keeping his
voice low he used his one movable eye to somehow indicate upwards. I
took it he meant the attic. But all of a sudden a curious idea came
into my mind.

'We?' I asked. 'Is she upstairs then?'

'Yes', he nodded and stood really close.

'And she's looking with you?'

'Yes, we're both looking.'

'Then the picture has been put away somewhere?'

'Yes, just imagine, ' he said indignantly. But I couldn't really
understand what she wanted it for.

'She wants to see it for herself, ' he whispered, coming even closer.

'Oh, I see, ' I said, as if I understood. Then he blew out the candle.
I saw how he stretched forward into the brightness, his eyebrows
raised high. Then there was darkness. I instinctively stepped back.

'What are you doing?' I cried out in a parched voice, trying to keep
myself controlled. He leapt towards me and clung to my arm, giggling.

'What is it?' I shouted at him trying to shake him off; but he held on
tightly. I couldn't prevent him putting his arm round my neck.

'Shall I tell you?' he hissed and a little saliva sprayed into my ear.

'Yes, yes, quickly.'

I didn't know what I was saying. Hwas holding me in a complete embrace

and stretching up.

'I've brought her a mirror, ' he said, and giggled again.

' A mi r r o r ? '

'Yes, because her picture's not there.'

'No, no, ' I uttered.

He suddenly pulled me a little bit closer to the window and pinched my

upper arm so sharply that I let out a yell.

'She's not in it, ' he breathed into my ear.

Automatically I pushed him away; something on him cracked, it seemed
to me as if I'd broken him.

'Come on, come on, ' and now it was my turn to laugh, 'Not in it, not
in what? '

'You're stupid, ' he replied angrily, no longer whispering. He pitched
his voice lower as if he were now starting on a new and unused part of
it. 'One is either in it, ' he pronounced with a precocious
sternness, 'in which case one can't be here, or if one is here, one
can ' t be in it . '

'Naturally, ' I answered promptly, without thinking. I was afraid he
might go off and leave me on my own. I even grabbed at him.

'Shall we be friends?' I proposed. He wanted to be asked.

'It's all the same to me, ' he said jauntily.

I was trying to begin a friendhip with him but I didn't dare put my

arm round him.

'Dear Erik, ' was all I could utter and I just touched him lightly

somewhere. I was suddenly very tired. I looked around. I no longer

understood how I'd got here and why I wasn't afraid. I didn't rightly

know where the windows and pictures were. And when we were leaving he

had to show me the way.

'They won't hurt you, ' he assured me magnanimously, and giggled again.

Dear, dear Erik; perhaps you have been, after all, my only friend. For
I've never had one. It's a pity you didn't care about friendship.
There are many things I would have loved telling you about. Perhaps we
would have got along. One can never know. I remember that your
portrait was being painted at that time. Grandfather had got someone
to come and paint you. An hour every morning. I can't recall what the
painter looked like, his name escapes me, though Mathilde Brahe was
forever repeating it.

Did he see you as I see you? You wore a suit of heliotrope-coloured
velvet. Mathilde Brahe was in raptures about that suit. But that
doesn't matter now. I would simply like to know if he really saw you.
Let's accept that he was a proper painter. Let's accept that it didn't
occur to him that you might die before he'd finished, that he didn't
regard the matter in any sentimental way at all; that he simply
worked; that the dissimilarity of your two brown eyes delighted him;
that he was not for one moment embarrassed by the stationary one; that
he had the tact not to lay on the table by your hand anything which to
a small degree was supporting it. Let's accept anything else that is
still necessary, and let's validate it: the portait that's in the
gallery at Urnekloster, your portrait, the last one there.

(And when people are leaving, and they've seen them all, there is
still a little boy there. One moment: who is that? A Brahe. Do you see
the silver pole on the black field and the peacock feathers? It even
gives the name: Erik Brahe. Wasn't there an Erik Brahe who was
executed? Of course, it's pretty well known. But this can't have
anything to do with that. This boy died when he was still a boy,
whenever that was. Can't you see that?)

Whenever anyone paid a visit and Erik was sent for, Fraulein Mathilde
Brahe always asserted that it was altogether amazing how closely he
resembled the old Countess Brahe, my grandmother. She was said to have
been a great lady. I didn't know her. On the other hand I very well
remember my father's mother, the real mistress of Ulsgaard. For it
seemed that she always remained such, in that she especially resented
Mama's coming into the house as the wife of the Master of the Hunt.
From that moment on, however, she continually acted in a retiring
manner and referred servants to Mama for trivial things while she
guietly made the the decisions and gave the instructions relating to
important matters without being accountable to a single soul. Mama, I
believe, would not have had it any other way. She was so little suited
to overseeing a large house; she completely lacked the ability to
differentiate between what was irrelevant and what was important. The
moment she was told anything it filled her whole mind and she forgot
everything else even though it was still there. She never complained
about her mother-in-law. And to whom could she have complained? Father
was an extremely respectful son and grandfather always had little to
say.

Frau Margarete Brahe had, as far back as I can remember, always been a
tall, unapproachable old lady. I can't imagine her in any other way
than as being much older than the Chamberlain. She lived her life in
our midst without giving a thought to anyone. She didn't depend on any
of us and always had with her a kind of lady's companion, an ageing
Countess Oxe, whom, through some favour or other, she had placed under

a measureless obligation. It must have been a notable exception
because performing good deeds was not her style. Children she did not
like, and animals weren't allowed near her. I don't know if there was
anything she did like. It was said that as a very young girl she had
been betrothed to the handsome Felix Lichnowski whose life was brought
to such a horrible end at Frankfurt. In point of fact, after her death
they found she'd kept a portrait of the Prince, which, if I'm not
mistaken, they returned to his family. I see now that over the years,
perhaps, and as a result of the kind of retired country life that had
evolved at Ulsgaard, she had foregone another brilliant life that had
been in store for her. It's difficult to say whether she mourned it or
not. Perhaps she scorned the opportunity that didn't come along, the
opportunity to live a life that called for skill and talent. She had
taken all of this so deeply into herself and had attached protective
coverings to it, a mass of hard, slightly metallic, gleaming
coverings, whose topmost surface could on any occasion be relied upon
to present a cool, new look. Admittedely now and then she revealed
through a naive impatience that not enough attention was being paid to
her; during my time there, when we were at table, she could suddenly
make a complicated show of swallowing the wrong way in order to secure
everyone's sympathy and, at least for a moment or two, allow her to
appear as sensational and thrilling as she would like to have been in
the great world. I suspect, however, that my father was the only one
who took these all too often upsets seriously. Leaning politely
forward across the table he would watch her, and immediately one could
feel him mentally offering her his own well behaved windpipe and
placing it entirely at her disposal. The Chamberlain, of course, had
likewise also stopped eating. He took a little sip of his wine and
kept his own counsel.

At table he had only once held fast to his own opinion as opposed to
his wife's. That was long ago, yet the story was still retold
maliciously and in secret; almost everywhere there was someone who
hadn't heard it. Time was, they say when the Chamberlain's wife would
work herself into a state about wine stains getting into the
tablecloth through someone's clumsiness; any such stain, no matter how
caused, did not escape her notice and drew from her the severest
rebuke, not to say exposure. This had happened even when several
famous guests were present. A few innocent stains which she referred
to in exaggerated terms were the object of her derisive accusations,
and though grandfather did his level best by means of little signs and
open banter, she stubbornly persisted with her reproaches--mind you,
she was to be cut off in mid-sentence. What in fact happened was
something that had never been done before and was completely
inconceivable. The Chamberlain had called for the red wine, which had
just been passed round, and he was now paying very close attention to
filling his own glass. The only thing was that, strange to tell, he
didn't stop pouring even though the glass had long been full, but,
under a growing silence, slowly and carefully he went on pouring until
Mama, who was never one to hold back, burst out laughing, and with her
laughter set the whole matter to rights. Now everybody joined in,
relieved, and the Chamberlain looked up and handed the bottle to the
servant .

Later another idiosyncrasy got the better of my grandmother. She
couldn't bear for anyone in the house to get sick. Once, when the cook
injured herself my grandmother happened to see her with her hand
bandaged, and she maintained that the whole house smelt of iodoform,
and it was hard convincing her that the woman couldn't be dismissed on
that account. She didn't want to be reminded of being ill. If anyone
were careless enough in her presence to show the slightest signs of
being unwell, she regarded it as nothing short of a personal insult
and would hold it against them for a long time.

The autumn mama died, the Chamberlain's wife shut herself and Sophie
off completely, keeping to her rooms and breaking off all contact with
us. Not even her son was admitted. It's certainly true that this death
occurred at a most inappropriate time. Rooms were cold, stoves smoked,
and mice had got back into the house; no place was safe from them. But
it was more than that. Mistress Margarete Brigge was outraged by the
fact that Mama was dying; by the fact that there was an item on the

agenda that she refused to talk about; that the young wife presumed to
take precedence over her as she herself imagined dying at some time
that had not yet been determined. For it often passed through her mind
that she would have to die. But she didn't want to be rushed. She
would die, of course, when it suited her, and after that they would
all be free to follow on behind her, if they were in such a tearing
hurry.

She never quite forgave us for Mama's death. As it was, she aged very
quickly over the following winter. When she walked she was as tall as
ever, but seated she would slump, and she was getting more and more
hard of hearing. You could sit and stare hard at her for hours
together and she would be unaware of you. She was somewhere within
herself; only seldom and for only a few moments did she come back into
her senses, which were empty, without occupant. Then she would say
something to the Countess who would straighten her mantilla for her
and with her large freshly washed hands would touch parts of her dress
as if water had been spilt on them or as if the dress were not very
clean.

She died one night as Spring got near, in town. Sophie Oxe ' s door was
open but she hadn't heard a thing; when they found her in the morning
she was as cold as glass .

Immediately afterwards the Chamberlain's dreadful illness began. It
was as if he had bided until she had gone so he could die without need
to consider her.

It was in the year following Mama's death when Abelone first caught my
attention. Abelone was there all the time. That was a great
disadvantage for her. I had observed once before on some occasion or
other that Abelone was disagreeable and I hadn't given the matter any
serious thought. Until then it would have appeared to me almost
ludicrous to ask what reason Abelone had for being there. Abelone was
there and people made use of her in whatever way they could. But I
suddenly asked myself: Why is Abelone here? Each one of us had our own
particular reason even if it was by no means always as evident as,
say, the usefulness of Miss Oxe. But why was Abelone there? For a
while people were saying that she should find something that amused
her. But that got forgotten. Nobody came forward with anything for
Abelone 's amusement. It was absolutely clear that that she was not
amusing herself.

All the same, Abelone had one asset: she sang. That's to say there
were times when she sang. There was a strong, unwavering music in her.
If it's true that angels are male, then you could probably say that
there was something male in her voice, a radiant, divine, maleness . I,
who even as a child had been so distrustful as regards music (not
because it lifted me out of myself more powerfully than everything
else but because it never landed me where it had found me but further
down, somewhere that was wholly incomplete), I tolerated this music on
which you could ascend higher and higher until you thought for a while
that it must be like heaven. I had no inkling then that Abelone was to
open yet heavens for me.

At first our relationship consisted in her telling me about Mama's
girlhood. She attached great importance to convincing me how
courageous and youthful Mama had been. There was no one, she assured
me, who could match her in dancing or riding. 'She was the boldest of
all, and tireless, and then she suddenly went and got married, ' said
Abelone, still amazed after so many years. 'It happened so
unexpectedy, no one rightly understood why.'

I was interested to know why Abelone had not married. To me she seemed
relatively old and the notion that she might still marry never entered
my head.

'There wasn't anyone, ' she replied simply, becoming truly beautiful as
she spoke. Is Abelone beautiful? I asked myself, surprised. Then I

left home to go to the Academy for Young Noblemen; it was the start of
a distasteful and harmful period. But there at Soro whenever I
separated myself from the others and they let me stand in peace at the
window I would look out in amongst the trees; and in such moments and
at night the certainty grew in me that Abelone was beautiful. And I
started writing her all those letters, lengthy ones and short, many of
them secret letters in which I thought I was writing about Ulsgaard
and about my present unhappiness . But, as I see it now, they may well
have been love letters. For when the vacation came, reluctantly, at
last, it was as if by agreement that we didn't meet in front of the
others .

Absolutely nothing had been agreed upon between us, but when the
carriage turned into the park I couldn't help getting down, perhaps
simply because I was unwilling to drive up to the house like some
stranger. It was already high summer. I ran along one of the paths
towards a laburnum tree. And there was Abelone. Beautiful, beautiful
Abelone .

I don't ever want to forget how it was when you looked at me. How you
wore your look, offering it as if it were freed from your upturned
face .

Ah, wasn't there a change in the climate all around us? At Ulsgaard
didn't the season grow milder from all our warmth? Are there not now
particular roses in the park that go on blooming right into December?

I don't want to talk about you, Abelone. Not because we deceived
eachother--since, even then, beloved, you loved someone you have never
forgotten, and I loved all women—but because only harm is done by
putting it into words.

There are tapestries here, Abelone, wall-tapestries. I am imagining
that you're here; six tapestries in all; come, let's walk slowly along
in front of them. But before that, step back and look at them all
together. How peaceful they are, aren't they? There's little variation
in them. See, there's always this oval, blue island floating in the
muted red background where there are flowers growing and little
animals busying about. Only there, in the last tapestry, does the
island rise a little as if it's become lighter. It always has a figure
on it, a woman in various costumes but always the same form. Sometimes
there's a smaller figure next to her, a maidservant, and there are
always animals bearing the coat-of-arms , big animals from the island,
all of a piece with the rest of the tapestry. To the left a lion and
to the right, bright, the unicorn; they are holding the same banners
which can be seen high above them: three silver moons rising in a blue
band on a red field--did you see it? Shall we begin with the first?

She is feeding the falcon. How splendid her costume is. The bird is on
her gloved hand and shifts about. She is looking at the bird and
putting her other hand into the bowl brought by the maidservant to
find something for it. Below to the right, a little silken-haired dog
sits on the train of her dress and is looking up hoping it will be
remembered. And, have you noticed, a low trellis of roses shuts off
the island at the rear. The animals bearing the coat-of-arms are
reared on their hind-legs in heraldic arrogance. The coat-of-arms
appears again as a cloak enfolding them. A beautiful clasp holds it
together. The cloak flutters.

As we move on to the next tapestry isn't our approach instinctively
more gentle the moment we realize how engrossed she is as she binds a
garland, a small crown of flowers. Thoughtfully she selects from the
flat-bottomed cup which the maidservant holds out to her the colour of
the carnation she will tie in next. Behind her on a bench stands a
basket of unused roses, unused, that a monkey has found. Now it's to
be carnations. The lion has grown indifferent but the unicorn on the
right understands.

Shouldn't there be music in this stillness? Or was it not already

there, restrained? Her heavy adornments make no sound as she
progresses (how slowly, do you see?) to the portable organ and,
standing, plays, separated by the organ flutes from her maidservant
who moves the bellows. She has never been so beautiful. It's wondrous
to see how hair has been brought forward in two plaits and combined
above the headpiece so that both ends rise out of the knot like a
short plume of a helmet. The lion, disgruntled, unwillingly endures
the sounds, biting back its howl. But the unicorn is beautiful, as if
caught in the rolling waves of music.

The island broadens out. A tent has been raised. Blue damask flashed
with gold. The animals part the sides to make an opening, and almost
plain in her royal apparel she steps forward. What are her pearls
compared with her? The maidservant has opened a small box and lifts
from it a necklace, a heavy, magnificent treasure that has always been
locked away. The little dog sits beside her raised on a seat specially
provided, and looks on. And have you discovered the motto along the
top edge of the tent? It reads: 'A mon seul desir.*'

*to my sole desire

What has happened? Why is that little rabbit down there jumping? Why
can you see immediately that it's jumping? Everything is out of joint.
The lion has nothing to do. The woman is holding the banner herself.
Or is she holding on to it? With her other hand she has taken hold of
the unicorn's horn. Is this mourning? Can mourning be so upright? And
can a mourning dress be as discreet as this one in green-black velvet
with faded patches showing here and there?

But we come now to another festival. No one has been invited.
Expectation has no role to play in it. Everything is there. Everything
is always. The lion looks around almost menacingly: no one is allowed
to come. We have never seen her tired before: is she tired? Or has she
sat down only because she's holding something heavy? You may be
thinking of a monstrance. But she lowers her other arm towards the
unicorn and the animal rears its head, flattered, gets to its feet and
comes and rest its head on her lap. It's a mirror she's holding. Do
you see: she's showing the unicorn its image--.

Abelone, I'm imagining you're here. Do you understand, Abelone? I
think you must understand.

BOOK TWO

Now the tapestries of the Dame a la Licorne* are also no longer in
the old chateau of Broussac. This is the time when everything is
leaving great houses; they can no longer hang on to anything. Danger
has become safer than safety. No one from the Delle Viste line walks
beside us with all that in their blood. They are all gone. No one
speaks your name, Pierre Aubusson, great Grand Master from an ancient
house, at whose desire, perhaps, were woven these pictures which
praise everything and disclose nothing. (Ah, why have poets written in
a different way about women, written more literally, as they thought.
It's certain that we weren't allowed to know otherwise.) Now we happen
to be among others who happen to be here and its almost makes you
afraid you haven't been invited. But there are some who go past when
not many are around. Young people scarcely pause unless it's to see,
with regard to this or that particular feature, what they are
reguired, by whatever subject, to have seen once.

*Lady with the Unicorn.

Occasionally, though, you'll see young girls in front of the
tapestries. For there are lots of young girls in the museums, girls
from somewhere or other who have left homes that no longer hold on to
anything; they find themselves in front of these tapestries and for a

short while forget about themselves. They've always felt that there
existed this kind of quiet life whose slowly moving gestures revealed
not quite all their significance and they dimly recall even thinking
for a time that such would be their life. Then hurriedly they'd get
out a sketchbook and begin to draw whatever presented itself: one of
the flowers or a happy little animal. It didn't matter; they'd already
been told exactly what they were looking at. And it really doesn't
matter. Just keep drawing; that's the main thing; because it's for
this they'd left home one day, rather stormily. They're from good
families. But whenever they lift their arm as they're drawing you can
see that their dress isn't buttoned at the back, or, at least, not all
the way. There are a few buttons they can't reach. That's because when
the dress was made there was not yet any talk of their suddenly
leaving home, alone. In families you always find there's someone who
sees to buttons like these. But here, dear God, who should waste their
time doing that in such a big city? You'd need a friend; but friends
are all in the same boat and what it comes down to is buttoning up
each other's dress. Which is ridiculous and reminds you of your
family, and that's what you don't want.

Now and then while they're drawing they can't avoid thinking whether
or not it might have been possible after all to remain at home. If one
could only have been religious, devoted, in step with the rest. But it
would look foolish to be trying to be the same as everyone else, would
look foolish. The path has somehow become narrower. Families are no
longer able to turn to God. What remains is only various alternative
ways, if need be, in which to share things. But what happened when
sharing was honest was that each individual received so little it was
a disgrace. And if there was cheating in the sharing-out, quarrels
broke out. No, it's better to draw whatever you're drawing. In time
you'll achieve a likeness. And with Art, if you take it bit by bit,
the result will be really quite enviable.

And so, putting all their effort into the task they have set
themselves these young girls forgo any longer view. They don't notice
how in everything they draw they are doing nothing other than
suppressing inside themselves the immutable life that in these woven
pictures radiantly opens up before them. They are not willing to
believe it. Now, when so much is changing, they too want to change.
They're very close to giving up on themselves and to thinking about
themselves in the way that how men might speak of them in their
absence. This seems progress to them. Already they're almost persuaded
that you search for one pleasure and then another and then an even
greater one: that life consists in this, if you don't want to lose it
through some kind of silliness. They've already begun to look around,
to search; they whose strength has always resided in being found.

That, I believe, is a result of being tired. For untold centuries they
have seen to the whole business of love. They have played the entire
dialogue--both parts. For the man has simply repeated the words,
badly. And he has made their shared learning difficult with his
distractedness , with his thoughtlessness, with his jealousy, which
itself was a kind of thoughtlessness. On the other hand women have
persevered day and night and have increased their love and their
misery. And from among them them, under the pressure of endless needs,
have arisen women, powerful in their love who, even while they called
out for the man had surpassed him, and outgrew him when he did not
return, like Gapara Stampa or the Portuguese nun, both of whom did not
cease until their agony swung round to become a bitter, icy splendour
that could no longer be confined. We know about each of these women
because there are letters that have been preserved as if by a miracle
and books containing poems of reproach and lament, and portraits in a
gallery that look at us with an expression that betokens tears, which
the artists succeeded in catching because they didn't know what it
was . But there have been countless more of them, such as those who
have burnt their letters, and others who had no strength left to write
them. Old women who had become hardened but had a precious core within
them which they concealed. Women who have grown stout and shapeless
from fatigue let themselves resemble their husbands, though inside
them where love had been at work in the dark, all was different.
Child-bearing women who never wanted to bear children and who

eventually perished in their eighth delivery still had the actions and
lightness of girls looking forward to love. And those who stayed with
men who were violent or who were drunkards had found inwardly the
means to keep at the greatest distance from them coulddn't help
shining as if they were perpetually surrounded by saints . Who can say
how many such women there were or who they were. It's as if they've
gone on ahead and destroyed all the words that could help others
understand .

But now when so much is changing isn't it for us to change as well?
Couldn't we try in some small way to develop and contribute our
efforts slowly, little by little to the task of loving. We have been
spared all the hardship which is why it has slipped in among our
amusements in the way that a piece of genuine lace can sometimes fall
into a child's toy-drawer and can take his fancy or cease to, and can
finally lie there among the toys that have been broken or taken apart,
in a worse state than them all. Though we're looked on as experts,
like all dilettants we've been spoiled by shallow pleasures. But what
if we were to despise our successes. What if we were to begin right
from the beginning to learn how love works, something that has always
been done for us. What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that
much is changing.

now I also know what was happening when Mama unrolled the short
lengths of lace. You see, she'd taken one of the single drawers from
Ingeborg's secretaire to use herself.

'Shall we have a look at them, Malte?' she would say happily as if
everything in the little yellow lacquered drawer were being given to
her as a present. And then from sheer anticipation she'd find it
impossible to unfold the wrapping tissue. I had to do it every time.
But I became quite excited when the pieces appeared. They were wound
round a wooden spindle that was completely hidden beneath all of the
lace. And then we would slowly unwind them and watch the patterns
unrolling, and we were a little startled each time one of them ended.
They stopped so suddenly.

First came selvedges of Italian handiwork, sturdy pieces with drawn
threads in which everything was repeated just as you see in a
peasant's garden. Then a whole run of Venetian needlepoint suddenly
latticed our view as if we were cloisters or jails. But it cleared
again and we saw deep into gardens that became more and more
artificial until everything was dense and warm to the eyes as in a
greenhouse: magnificent plants that were new to us spread out their
giant leaves, tendrils reached out and grasped one another as if they
were dizzy, and the large open blooms of the Points d'Alencon made
everything blurred. Suddenly, quite tired and muddled, we stepped into
the long panel of Valenciennes lace where it was early on a winter's
morning and all white with hoar frost. We pushed our way through the
snowcovered bushes of Binche and came to places no one had ever
visited; the branches hung down so curiously there could well have
been a grave beneath them, but we hid that thought from each other.
The cold pressed in on us more and more and when at last we got down
to the small and altogether delicate Kloppel lace Mama said, ' now
we'll get frost flowers on our eyes. ' Which is what happened, because
for us, inwardly, it was very warm.

As we were rolling up the pieces of lace we both sighed; we were a
long time at the task, but we didn't want to entrust it to anyone
else. 'Just think, if we'd had to make them, ' said Mama looking
positively frightened. That was something I couldn't imagine that at
all. I caught myself thinking of little animals constantly spinning
and being left in peace so they'd get on with it. No, they'd been
women, of course.

'The women who made them are certain to have gone to heaven, ' I said
admiringly. It occurred to me, I remember, that I hadn't asked about
heaven for a long time. Mama gave out a breath, the spindles were back
together .

After a while when I had already forgotten about it, she said very
slowly: 'To heaven? I think they're definitely there. If one looks at
it in that light it can well be an eternal bliss . We know so little
about it . '

Often when we had visitors mention was made that the Schulins were
economising. The big old manor-house had burnt down a few years before
and they were now living in the two narrow wings, and were making that
do. But hospitality was in their very blood. They couldn't give it up.
If anyone arrived at our house unexpectedly, they would probably come
from the Schulins, and if someone suddenly glanced at the clock and
had to dash off in a fright, you could be certain they were expected
at Lystager.

Mama never really went out any more, but that was something the
Schulins couldn't understand. There was no alternative but to drive
over to them. It was in December, after a few early falls of snow; the
sleigh was ordered for three 3 o'clock and I was to go with them. Not
that we were ever a punctual. Mama didn't like the carriage to be
announced and most times she came down far too early. Finding no one
there she would always remember something she should have done a long
time before, and upstairs somewhere she would start searching for or
arranging things with the result that she could be difficult to find.
Eventually we'd all be standing waiting. And when she was at last
seated and wrapped up, it would appear that something had been
forgotten and Sieversen had to be called because only Sievensen knew
where it was . But then we would suddenly drive off before Sievensen
came back.

That day the weather never brightened at all. The trees stood about in
the mist as if they didn't know which way to go. And there was
something cocksure in the way we drove driving among them. In between
times the snow fell again silently and now it was as if the very last
trace of everything had been erased and we were travelling into a
blank page. All you could hear was the ringing of the sleighbells but
you couldn't tell exactly from which direction it was coming. Then
came the moment when it stopped; it was as if the last bell had
jingled and then they'd all gathered again to give out the fullness of
their combined sound. We could well have imagined the church steeple
as being on our left. But the edge of the park suddenly appeared high,
almost above our heads and we found ourselves in the avenue. The sound
of the sleighbells no longer faded away; it seemed to hang from the
trees right and left in clusters . Then we swung in and drove round
something and past something else and halted in the middle.

Georg had completely forgotten that the house wasn't there and for a
moment we all thought the same. We went up the steps that led to the
old terrace and were simply amazed that it was so dark. All of a
sudden to the left below and behind us a door opened and someone
shouted: 'Over here! 'and held up a hazy lamp and swung it from side to
side. My father laughed: 'We're rising up around here like ghosts, 'and
helped us back down the steps.

'But there was a house here just now, ' said Mama and wasn't
particularly swift in adjusting her mood to Wjera Schulin who, warm
and laughing, had come running out to us. At that point, we had, of
course, to go guickly inside, which left no more time for thinking
about the house. We left our coats in a narrow vestibule and then
suddenly we were among lights and facing a warm fire.

These Schulins were a redoubtable line of independent women. I don't
know if there were any sons. I only remember three sisters. The eldest
had been married to a Marchese in Naples from whom she was now
obtaining a divorce, slowly on account of many lawsuits. Then came Zoe
of whom it was said there was nothing she didn't know. And first and
foremost there was Viera, warm Viera; God knows what has become of
her. The Countess, a Narischkin, was really the fourth sister, and in
certain respects the youngest. She had no kwowledge of anything and

had to be instructed by her children constantly. And Count Schulin,
good fellow, felt as if he were married to all these women and went
around kissing them as the occasion presented itself.

The moment we began to enter he laughed out loud and bid each one of
us welcome. I was passed around the ladies who touched me and asked me
questions. But it was my firm intention, when that was over, to
somehow slip away and look around outside for the house. I was
convinced it was there that day. Getting out was not so difficult;
like a dog I scurried along beneath all the clothes and through the
door that was standing ajar into the lobby. But once there I found the
the outside door wouldn't budge. There were various devices, chains
and bolts that in my haste I couldn't deal with. Suddenly the door
actually opened, but it made a loud noise and before I could get
outside I was seized and pulled back.

'Stop. There's no running away from here, ' said an amused Viera
Schulin. She bent down to me and I was determined not to say a word to
this warm person. But when I said nothing she took it to mean that a
call of nature had driven me to the door; she caught hold of my hand
and without further ado she started to haul me away with the half-
confidential half-lofty notion of taking me with her to some place or
other. This intimate misunderstanding did more than hurt my feelings.
I tore my hand away and looked at her angrily. 'I want to see the
house, ' I said proudly. She didn't understand.

'The big house outside at the steps. '

'You silly' she said making a grab at me. 'There's no house there any
more. ' I insisted there was.

'We'll go and look sometime during the day ' she suggested, giving
way. 'We can't go crawling around out there now. There are holes there
and right behind are Papa's fish-ponds which aren't allowed to freeze
over. Fall in there and you'll turn into a fish. '

With that she pushed me along in front of her, back into the brightly
lit rooms. They were all sitting talking and I ran my eyes along the
row: they only go there, of course, when the house isn't there, I
thought scornfully; if Mama and I lived here it would be there all the
time. While the others were all speaking at the same time Mama looked
preoccupied. She was bound to be thinking about the house.

Zoe' sat down beside me and asked me questions. From time to time her
face with its well ordered features would register new insights, as if
she were constantly perceiving things. My father was seated leaning
somewhat towards his right listening to the Marchesa who was laughing.
Count Schulin was standing between Mama and his wife and was
recounting something. But I saw the Countess interrupting him in mid-
sentence .

'No, child, you're imagining it, ' said the Count good naturedly, but
suddenly he had the same troubled look on his face, which he stretched
forward above the two ladies . The Countess was not to be deflected
from her so-called imagining. She looked very strained like someone
who doesn't want to be disturbed. With her soft, ring-laden hands she
was making dismissive gestures when someone said ' shsh ' and suddenly
there was total silence.

From behind the people in the room the large objects that had come
from the old house were pressing in far too close. The heavy family
silver gleamed and bulged as if it were being viewed through a
magnifying glass. My father looked around disconcertedly .

'Mama can smell something, 'said Viera Schulin behind him. 'We must all
be quiet; she smells with her ears. ' But she herself was standing
there eyebrows raised, attentive, all nose.

The Schulins in this particular matter had been a bit odd since the
fire In the narrow, overheated rooms a smell could arise at any
moment, and then it would be checked and each person would give their
opinion. Zoe, practical and conscientious, tackled the stove; the

Count went round, stood in each corner for a little while and waited;
'Nothing here, ' he would then say. The Countess had got to her feet
but didn't know where to look. My father turned slowly about as if he
had the smell behind him. The Marchesa, who had immediately taken it
to be a nasty smell held her handkerchief over nose and looked from
one person to another to see if it had gone. 'Here, here' Viera called
out from time to time as if she had found it. And around each word
there was a curious silence. For my part I had diligently sniffed
about like the rest. But all at once (was it the heat of the room or
the proximity of so many lights?) and for the first time in my life I
was overcome by something resembling the fear of ghosts. It became
clear to me that all these recognisably grown up people who just a
short time ago had been talking and laughing were going round back
bent busying themselves with something invisible, and that they were
admitting they couldn't see the something that was there. And what was
terrifying was the fact that it was stronger than all of them.

My fear increased. I felt as if what they were looking for could
suddenly break out on me like a rash, and then they would see it and
point at me. In utter despair I looked across at Mama. She was sitting
curiously erect as she often did and she seemed to be waiting for me.
Scarcely had I sat down beside her and sensed that she was trembling
inside when I knew that the house just then was starting to die away
again.

'Malte, you sissy, ' came a laugh from somewhere. It was Viera' s voice.
But we didn't let go of each other and together we saw it through; and
we stayed like that, Mama and I, until the house had once more
entirely vanished.

It was birthdays that were richest in experiences that verged on the
incomprehensible. You already knew, of course, that Life was happy to
make no distinction between days; but on this day you got up feeling
you had a right to joy, a right that was not open to doubt. The feeling
that you possess this right probably takes hold within very early and
at the time when you grasp at everything and clearly get everything,
when, with an unerring power of imagination you enhance the things
you already cherish with the same primary-coloured intensity that
already governs your new desires.

But then suddenly those strange birthays come along when you're fully
and confidently aware of this right but you see others becoming
unsure. You would probably still like to have someone dress you as
they did before and then accept everything that came along. But you're
hardly awake before someone outside shouts that the cake hasn't
arrived yet, or you hear something smash as the presents are being
arranged on a table in the next room, or somebody comes in and leaves
the door open with the result that you see all the presents before you
should. That's the moment when something like an operation is
performed on you. A short, terribly painful incision. But the hand
that does it is practised and steady. It's soon over. And hardly is it
finished before you stop thinking about yourself; what's needed is for
you to rescue the birthday by observing the others and forestalling
their mistakes, and confirming them in their illusion that they're
coping splendidly. They don't make it easy. They prove to be
unimaginably clumsy, almost mindless. They manage to come along with
presents intended for other people; you run to meet them and then you
have to act as if you were just running around the room for exercise,
not for anything special. They want to surprise you and with a very
superficial imitation of expectation they lift up the bottommost layer
inside the gift-box where there's nothing but cotton wool; then you
have to ease their embarrassment. Or, if its something mechanical
they've given you, they ruin it on the first try by overwinding it.
That's why it's a good idea to have practised beforehand by
overwinding a mouse or some similar toy and pushing it along
discreetly with your foot; this way you can often deceive them so as
to help them over their shame.

In the end you'll have done everything asked of you and without any

special talent. Talent is only really necessary if someone has taken a
lot of trouble and, displaying self-importance and good-humour, has
brought you a joy and even from a distance you could see that it was a
joy for someone quite different from you, a completely alien joy.

It must have been before my time when people knew, really knew, how to
tell a story. I've never heard anyone telling one. Every time Abelone
spoke to me about Mama's youth, it was clear she couldn't narrate. Old
Count Brahe could, though. I want to write down what she said about

that.

There must have been a period in Abelone ' s young life when her own
emotionality was far from confined. That was when the Brahes lived in
town in the Bredgade and did a fair amount of entertaining. When she
went up to her room late in the evening, she would think she was tired
like the others. But then all at once she would feel the window and--
if I've understood rightly--she could stand facing the night for hours
on end, thinking: this is about me. 'I stood there like a prisoner, '
she said, 'and the stars were freedom. ' Then she had no difficulty
going to sleep. The expression 'to fall asleep' ill matches this year
of her girlhood. Sleep was something that rose with you , and from
time to time you opened your eyes and lay on a new surface that was
still far from being the topmost one. And then you were up before
daybreak, even in winter when the others would come sleepily and late
to breakfast. Of an evening when it grew dark there were always only
candles for the whole household, candles for sharing. But the two
candles that were lit very early in the new darkness, giving
everything a fresh start— those candles you had to yourself. They
stood in their low two-branched candlestick and shone peacefully
through the small, oval, tulle lampshades painted with roses that now
and then had to be reset. That didn't disturb anything; for one thing
you were in no hurry whatsoever, and for another there were the times
you needed for looking upwards and reflecting when you were writing a
letter or making an entry in the diary you'd started once when your
handwriting was completely dif f erent--timid, beautiful.

Count Brahe lived quite separate from his daughters. He considered it
sheer delusion when anyone claimed to be sharing their lives with
others. ('Sharing, you say..., ' he would remark) But he didn't find it
unwelcome to hear people talking of his daughters: he would listen
attentively as if they lived in a different town.

It was, then, quite extraordinary when one morning after breakfast he
beckoned Abelone to him: 'We have the same habits, it seems: I too
write very early in the morning. You can help me.' Abelone remembered
it as if it were yesterday.

The very next morning she was led into her father's reputedly
inaccessible study. She didn't have time to take a close look at the
room as she was immediately given a seat facing the Count across his
writing table which seemed to her like a plain with books and piles of
paper as villages .

The Count dictated. Those who maintained that Count Brahe was writing
his memoirs weren't entirely wrong. Only, these didn't deal with his
political and military reminiscences that were eagerly awaited. 'I
forget them, ' the old gentleman would say curtly when anyone dropped a
hint in that direction. But what he didn't want to forget was his
childhood. He held on to it. And in his way of thinking it was quite
in order for his very distant past to have control of him now, and for
him to turn his gaze inward where it lay as in a northern summer
night, intensified and unsleeping.

Sometimes he would spring to his feet and speak into the candle
flames, causing them to flicker. Or he would order whole sentences to
be crossed out yet again; then he would pace violently up and down,
his nile green silk dressing gown billowing. Throughout all this there
was one other person present: Sten, the Count's old Jutlander valet
whose job it was when grandfather jumped up was to put his hands on
top of the loose sheets of paper, covered with notes, that lay around
on the desk. His Grace entertained the notion that modern paper was

worthless, being much too light so that, given the least opportunity,
it would fly away. And Sten, whose long upper half was all you saw of
him shared this distrust and appeared to sit on his hands, blind in
daylight and solemn as an owl.

This Sten spent his afternoons reading Swedenborg and none of the
other servants would ever have cared to go into his room because, so
it was said, he was in communion with the dead. Sten's family had
always sought contact with spirits and Sten had been marked out for
this kind of communication. His mother had seen an apparition the
night she gave birth to him. Sten had big round eyes and the other end
of his vision lay behind the person he was looking at. Abelone's
father often asked after spirits the same way you'd ask after
relatives: 'Are they coming, Sten?' he would ask kindly. 'It's good if
they come . '

For a few days the dictation continued. But then Abelone couldn't
spell ' Eckernf orde . ' It was a proper noun but she'd never heard it
before. The Count who, truth to tell, had been looking quite some time
for an excuse to abandon the writing which was too slow for his
memories, made out he was loath to continue.

'She can't write it, ' he said harshly, 'and others won't be able to
read it. So will they see what I'm getting at?' he continued angrily,
not taking his eyes off Abelone.

'Will they see this Saint-Germain?, ' he shouted at her. 'Did we say
Saint-Germain? Cross it out. Write: The Marquis von Belmare. '

Abelone crossed it out and wrote. But the Count went on speaking so
fast that no one could have kept up with him.

'Splendid man, Belmare; couldn't stand children but he took me on his
knee, little as I was, and I took it into my head to bite his diamond
buttons. That delighted him. He laughed and lifted my head so that we
were looking into each other's eyes: 'You've got excellent teeth, ' he
said, 'teeth to tackle anything ...' --But I was looking closely at his
eyes. I've travelled around since that time. I've seen all kinds of
eyes, but, believe me: never again eyes like those. For these eyes to
see anything it needn't be there, it was already within them. You've
heard of Venice? Good. I tell you, those eyes would have brought
Venice into this room, and Venice would have been here, just as this
desk is here. I was once sitting in the corner listening as he told my
father about Persia: sometimes I think my hands still carry the smell
of it. My father held him in high esteem, and His Highness the
Landgrave was something along the lines of a pupil of his. But there
were, of course, plenty of people who took it amiss that he believed
in the past only when it was inside him. What they couldn't grasp was
that stuff only makes sense if you're born with it.'

'Books are empty, ' shouted the Count making a furious gesture at the
wall, 'Blood, that's what matters; it's in there we have to be able to
read. ' This Belmare had wondrous stories in his with remarkable
pictures; he could open the book where he wanted, there was always
something written there; no page in his blood had been skipped. And
from time to time when he locked himself away and leafed through it on
his own he came to the passages on alchemy and precious stones and
colours. Why shouldn't all that have been left in? They're certainly
somewhere .

'This man would have had no trouble living with a truth, if he'd been
on his own. But it was no small matter being alone with a truth like
this. And it would offend his good taste to invite people to visit him
on account of his truth; he didn't want his Lady to be an object of
gossip: he was far too much an oriental in that regard. 'Adieu,
Madame ', he said truthfully, 'until a different time. Perhaps in a
thousand years one will be stronger and more undisturbed. Your beauty,
Madame, is only now revealing itself, ' he said and it wasn't merely a
compliment. And with that off he went and established his zoo for
people to visit, a kind of Jardin d ' Acclimatation for the larger
species of lies which we had never yet seen and a palm-house for

exaggerations and a small well-tended fig grove of false secrets.
People came from all around and he strolled about with diamond buckles
on his shoes and was totally at the service of his guests.

'A shallow existence: how? Basically it was a token of chivalry for
his lady, as well as being a boon for his lengthening years. '

For a while the old gentleman had nothing more to say to Abelone whom
he had forgotten. He paced madly back and forth and cast challenging
glances at Sten as if Sten at any given moment would transform himself
into the man he was thinking of. But Sten was not going to transform
himself yet.

'He had to be seen, ' the Count persisted crazily. 'Time was when he
was perfectly visible although in many towns and cities the letters he
received were addressed to no one: they just had the name of the place
on them, nothing else. But I saw him.

'He wasn't handsome. ' The Count gave a peculiar hurried laugh. 'He
wasn't even what people call distinguished or refined, there were
always more refined-looking men around him. He was rich: but to him it
was simply a sort of notion that couldn't be relied on. He was well-
built, although other men looked after themselves better. In those
days, of course, I couldn't judge whether or not he was intellectually
stimulating or this or that which showed him to be a man of worthy
qualities— but he was . '

The Count, trembling, stood there and made a movement as if he were
positioning something in space and leaving it there. At this point he
became aware of Abelone.

'Do you see him?' he barked at her. And suddenly he seized one of the
silver candlesticks and shone it blindingly in her face. Abelone
remembered she'd seen him.

Over the next few days Abelone was summoned regularly and the
dictation, after the incident, went on much more smoothly. Drawing
from all kinds of documents the Count was compiling his earliest
memories of the Bernstorff circle in which his father had played a
certain role. Abelone was now so accustomed to the peculiarities of
her work that those who saw them working could easily take their
purposeful collaboration for a genuine closeness.

Once, as Abelone was about to leave, the old gentleman walked up to
her and it was as if he were holding a surprise behind his back:
'Tomorrow we'll write about Julie Reventlow, ' he said and, savouring
his words, added: 'She was a saint. '

Presumably Abelone looked at him in disbelief.

'Yes, yes, there's still all that, ' he insisted, as if issuing an
order, 'there's all that, Countess Abel. ' He took hold of Abelone's
hands and opened them like a book.

'She had the stigmata, ' he said, 'here and here. ' And he gave a hard
sharp tap on each palm.

Abelone didn't know the term 'stigmata' . It'll become clear, she
thought; she was very impatient to hear about the saint whom her
father had actually seen. But she wasn't sent for again, not on the
next morning, nor later. —

'Countess Raventlow was often spoken of in your family, ' Abelone
concluded tersely when I asked her to tell me more. She looked tired;
she also claimed to have forgotten most of it. 'But sometimes I still
feel the two marks, ' she said with a smile, and she couldn't stop
smiling as she looked almost with curiosity into her empty hands .

Even before my father's death everything had changed. Ulsgaard was no
longer in our possession. My father died in town in an apartment that
seemed to me hostile and disconcerting. At the time I was living
abroad and I arrived too late.

He was laid out on a bier between two rows of high candles in a room
that looked out onto a courtyard. The smell of the flowers was an
unintelligible medley like a lot of different voices all at the same
time. His handsome face with the eyes closed had the expression of
someone obligingly trying to cast his mind back. He was in the uniform
of the Master of the Hunt, but for some reason or other the white
ribbon had been put on instead of the blue. His hands were not folded,
they lay crosswise and looked meaningless, like copies of hands. I'd
been hastily informed that he had suffered a great deal: none of that
was evident. His features had been tidied like the furniture of a room
that a guest has vacated. I felt as if I'd seen him dead rather often;
I was so familiar with it all.

Only the surroundings were, in an unpleasant way, new to me. This
oppressive room was new, having windows opposite, very likely other
people's windows. It was new to have Sieversen coming in from time to
time and doing nothing. Sieversen had grown old. I was expected to
have breakfast. Breakfast was announced several times. I couldn't
possibly face breakfast breakfast that morning. I didn't notice that
they wanted to get me out of the room; eventually, because I hadn't
gone, Sieversen somehow made it known that the doctors had arrived. I
had no idea what for. There was still something left to do, Sieversen
said, and looked intently at me with her eyes strained and reddened.
Then in came, rather precipitately, two gentlemen: the doctors. The
first one lowered his head with a jerk, as if he had horns and
intended to butt me, but in fact it was so that he could view us over
his glasses, first Sieversen, then me.

He bowed with the formality of a student. 'The Master of the Hunt had
one more wish, 'he said in the same manner as when he had entered;
again I had the feeling he was approaching things headlong. I somehow
made it necessary for him to direct his gaze through the glasses. His
colleague was a chubby, thin-skinned blond man; it occurred to me that
it would be easy to make him blush. A pause. It was strange that the
Master of the Hunt still had wishes .

For no reason I glanced again at that handsome well-proportioned face.
And I knew that he wanted certainty. That basically was what he had
always wanted. Now it was to be his.

'You are here to perforate the heart; please go ahead. '

I bowed and stepped back. The two doctors then bowed simultaneously
and began straighaway to confer. Someone was already moving the
candles aside. But the elder one of the doctors again took a couple of
steps towards me. He saved himself the last part of the way by
stopping at a certain spot and craning forward; he looked at me
angrily.

'It is not necessary, ' he said, 'that is, I think it is better if
you . . . '

He seemed sloppy and shabby in his thriftily hurried posture. I bowed
once more; it just happened, my bowing again.

'Thank you, ' I said curtly, 'I shan't disturb you. '

I knew I could bear this and there was no reason for me to withdraw.
It had to be. It lent reason to everything there. Besides, I had never
seen what it was like when someone is pierced through the heart. It
seemed the right thing to do not to turn down such an out of the
ordinary experience when it arose as a matter of course. Already at
that time I no longer actually believed in disappointments, so there
was nothing to be afraid of.

No, no, there's nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the

least thing. It's because everything is composed of so many single
details that are unforeseeable. We ignore them in the hurry of using
our imagination, so we don't know they're missing. But realities are
slow and indescribably detailed.

Who would have thought, for example, of this resistance? Hardly had
the broad, high breast been exposed when the hurried little man found
the relevant spot. But the swiftly applied instrument didn't go in. I
had the feeling that all time was suddenly gone from the room. We
could have been in a painting. Then time came plunging back with a
faint gliding sound and there was more of it than we could use.
Suddenly there was a tapping sound. I'd not heard tapping like that
before: a warm, reserved double tapping. My hearing transmitted it and
at the same time I saw that the doctor had pushed through to the
bottom. But it took a while before the two impressions combined in me.
Right, I thought, it's through. As far as the tempo was concerned the
tapping was almost gloating.

I looked at the doctor whom I had now known for such a long time. No,
he was in complete command of himself: a gentleman working briskly and
objectively who had to leave almost rightaway. There wasn't a trace of
pleasure or satisfaction about him. Only, on his left temple a few
hairs were standing up out of some kind of ancient instinct. He
carefully withdrew the instrument which left behind something like a
mouth from which twice in succession blood emerged as if the mouth
were saying something in two syllables. The young blond doctor
absorbed it in his wad of cotton. And now the wound remained quiet,
like a closed eye.

I assume I bowed once more, though without paying attention this time.
I was astonished, to say the least, to find myself alone. The uniform
had been straightened with the white ribbon lying across it as before.
But now the Master of the Hunt was dead, and not he alone. Now our
heart, the heart of our race, was bored through. All gone. Thus the
shattering of the helmet: 'Today Brigge and nevermore, ' a voice in me
said .

I wasn't thinking of my own heart. And when it came to me later, I
knew for the first time and with complete certainty that there was
nothing that linked me with it. It was an individual heart. It was
already beginning from the beginning.

I know I'd imagined I couldn't depart straightaway. First, I told
myself, everything had to be put in order. As to what had to be put in
order I wasn't quite sure. There was virtually nothing to be done. I
walked around town and detected a definite change in everything. I
found it pleasant to step out of the hotel where I was staying and see
that it was now a city for grownups and that it was putting on its
best front for me almost as if for a stranger. Everything had become
that little bit smaller and I strolled Langelinie out as far as the
lighthouse and then back again. As chance would have it, when I
entered the Amaliengade district there came from I don't know where
something I'd recognised years before, something that was trying to
exert power over me once more. All around there were certain corner-
windows or archways or street lamps that knew a great deal about one
and were threatening one with it . I looked them in the face and made
them feel I was staying at the Hotel Phoenix and could leave at any
moment. But it troubled my conscience. The suspicion arose in me that
none of those influences and connections had really yet been dealt
with. Indistinct as they were I'd one day abandoned them secretly.
Even one's childhood would still, as it were, need completing if one
didn't want to give it up as lost forever. And while I understood how
I had lost it, I felt at the same time that I would never have
anything else to put in its place. I spent a few hours every day in
Dronningens Tva^rgade in the cramped rooms that looked insulted, as do
all rented rooms where someone has died. I walked back and forth
between the desk and the big white-tiled stove burning the Master of
the Hunt's papers. I'd begun by throwing the correspondence, already
in bundles, in the fire but the bundles were tied too tightly and
simply charred at the edges. It was a tussle working them loose. Most
of them had a strongly persuasive smell that forced its way into me as

if it wanted to stir my memories. I didn't have any. Then some
photographs, heavier than the others happened to slip out; these
photographs took took an unbelievably long time to burn. I don't know
why but I suddenly imagined Ingeborg's picture to be among them. But
whenever I looked I saw mature, splendid, distinctly beautiful wowen,
and they took my thoughts elsewhere. That was proof enough that I
wasn't entirely without memories. It had been in exactly such eyes as
these that I, a growing boy, had sometimes seen myself when I crossed
the street with my father. From inside a carriage they could surround
me with a glance that I could barely shake off. I now know that they
were comparing me with my father and that the result was not in my
favour. Certainly not, the Master of the Hunt had no cause to fear
comparisons .

It may be I know something that he was afraid of. I'll tell how I made
this assumption . There was a piece of paper that had lain folded for a
long time deep in his wallet and was now crumbly and broken at its
corners. I read it before I burnt it. It was in his finest hand, firm
and even, but I noticed rightaway that it was only a copy.

'Three hours before his death, ' so it began, and it concerned
Christian IV. Of course I can't repeat the contents word for word.
Three hours before his death he wished to leave his bed. The doctor
and the valet, Wormius, helped him to his feet. He was a little
unsteady but he was standing and they dressed him in his quilted
nightgown. Then he suddenly sat down at end of the bed and uttered
something. It was incomprehensible. The doctor kept constant hold of
his left hand to save him from sinking backwards onto the bed. They
sat there like that and from time to time the King painfully and in a
thick voice said a word no one could understand. Eventually the doctor
started talking to him gently in the hope of fathoming what was in the
King's mind. After a short while the King interrupted him and suddenly
said quite clearly: '0 doctor, doctor, what is his name?' The doctor
struggled to think.

'Sperling, most gracious Majesty.'

But that wasn't what he actually meant. The King, as soon as he heard
that they understood him, opened wide his one remaining eye, the
right, and using his whole face said the one word that his tongue had
been forming for hours, the only word he still had: 'Doden', he said,
' Doden* ' .

* (in Danish) Death.

There was nothing else on the paper. I read it several times before I
burnt it. And it occurred to me that my father had suffered greatly at
the end. So I had been told.

Since then I have thought a good deal about the fear of death, not
without taking into account certain experiences of my own. I think I
can probably say that I have felt it. It has come over me in crowded
cities, surrounded by other people, has come over me often for no
reason at all. Though it's true that often there have been plenty of
reasons: take for instance when someone was sitting on a bench and the
bench gave way and they all stood around and looked at him, and he was
already far beyond feeling any fear: then I had his fear. Or that time
in Naples when the young person sitting opposite me in the tram died.
At first it looked like a faint, we even travelled on for a while. But
then there was no doubt that we needed to stop. And the carriages
behind us came to a halt all bunched up as if there was never going to
be any traffic in that direction again. The pale, fat girl could well
have died peacefully as she was, leant against the woman next to her.
But her mother wouldn't allow that. She caused her all sorts manner of
difficulties. She messed up her clothing and poured something into her
mouth that couldn't keep anything in it any more. She rubbed her
forehead with a liquid someone had given her and the moment the eyes
rolled back a little she started shaking her to make them look

forwards again. She screamed into those eyes that did not hear, she
tugged the whole of the girl ' s body this way and that as if she were a
doll, finally she brought up a hand and slapped the fat face with all
her might so that it shouldn't die. That's when I took fright.

But I'd been afraid even earlier. For example when my dog died. The
same dog that made me feel blameworthy once and for all. He was very
ill. I had been kneeling all day beside him when suddenly he gave a
short jerky bark as he used to do whenever a stranger came into the
room. It was the type of bark that was reserved for such occasions, so
to speak, and I automatically glanced towards the door. But the bark
was already inside him. Worriedly I searched his eyes and he searched
mine; but not to say our goodbyes. He looked hard at me; he was
displeased. He was accusing me of having let it in. He was convinced I
could have prevented it. It was evident that he had always
overestimated me. And there was no time left for me to explain.
Disconsolate and lonely he kept his eyes fixed on me right to the end.

Similarly I was afraid in autumn when the first flies came into the
rooms and revived themselves one last time in the warmth. They were
remarkably dried looking and were terrified by their own buzzing; you
could see that they no longer knew quite what they were doing. For
hours they never made a move until it occurred to them that they were
still alive; then they flung themselves willy-nilly in any direction
and had no idea what they should do when they arrived; you could hear
them dropping down again here, there and everywhere. And they ended up
crawling all over the place, slowly mortifying the whole room.

But I could be afraid even when I was on my own. Why should I act as
if those nights had never been, the nights when the fear of death
caused me to sit up in bed clinging to the thought that sitting was at
least something that only a living person could do; the dead couldn't
sit up. This always took place in one of those chance rooms which
deserted me immediately when things were going badly for me, as if
they were afraid of being questioned and of being implicated my nasty
affairs. There I sat and I probably looked so dreadful that there was
nothing that had the courage to acknowledge me; never once did the
candle, which I had obligingly lit, show it wanted anything to do with
me. It shone as if it were in an empty room. My last hope every time
was the window. I imagined that outside there still might be something
that belonged to me, even now, even in my sudden desperate need in the
face of death. But hardly had I looked towards the window when I
wished that it had been barricaded, every inch, like the wall. For now
I knew that out there things were going along with the same complete
indifference, and that also out there was nothing except my
loneliness. The loneliness that I had brought upon myself and to whose
size my heart no longer bore any comparison. I thought of people I'd
walked away from and I didn't understand how one could abandon people.

My God, my God, if nights like this lay ahead of me grant me at least
one of the thoughts I've now and then been able to think. What I'm
asking for now is not so unreasonable; for I know that they come
directly from my fear because my fear was so great. When I was a boy
they hit me in the face and told me what a coward I was. That was
because I was still bad at being afraid. But since then I've learnt to
be afraid with the real fear that only increases when the power to
produce it increases. We can have no idea of this power except in our
fear. For it's so wholly incomprehensible, so completely opposed to us
that our brain disintegrates at the point where we struggle to think
about it. And yet, for a while now I have believed that it is our
power, the whole of our power, that is too strong for us. It's true
that we don't know it, but don't we know least what is rightly our
own? Sometimes I think about how heaven came to be, and how death;
because we've distanced ourselves from what is most valuable to us,
because there were so many other things to do first and because we
were too busy to safeguard it. The passage of time has now obscured
this, and we have grown accustomed to lesser things. We no longer
recognise what is ours, and we are appalled by its sheer magnitude.
Can that not be so?

Besides I now well understand someone carrying with him all these
years deep in his wallet the description of another's last hour. It
wouldn't even have to be anything specially chosen; they all have
something that verges on the unusual. Can't you imagine, for example,
someone copying out for themselves an account of how Felix Arvers
died. It was in hospital. He was dying gently and composed, and the
nun perhaps thought that he was further along his last journey than
was. In a very loud voice she called out some instruction or other as
to where they could find this and that. She was a somewhat uneducated
nun; she had never seen the word 'corridor' written but she couldn't
avoid using it at that moment; thus it happened that she said
'collidor', thinking it was the way you said it. Whereupon Arvers
postponed his dying. It seemed to him necessary that the matter be
cleared up first. He became completely lucid and set her right: the
word is 'corridor' . Then he died. He was a poet and hated
approximates; or perhaps to him it had to do with truth; or maybe it
bothered him to be taking with him as a last impression that of world
continuing on its way so carelessly. One can no longer say. But one
shouldn't mistake it for pedantry. Otherwise the same reproach would
be levelled at the saintly Jean de Dieu, who as he was dying jumped
up and still managed to cut down the man who had just hanged himself
in the garden. In some miraculous way a message of what was about to
happen had penetrated the hidden tension of the saint's agony. He too
was concerned only with the truth.

There exists a being that is perfectly harmless; if it comes into view
you hardly notice it and you instantly forget it again. However,
should it somehow invisibly invade your hearing, it starts to develop,
it creeps out of itself, so to speak, and one has seen cases where it
has got as far as the brain and has thrived in this organ with
terrible effect resembling pneumococci in dogs that enter through the
nose .

This being is your neighbour.

Now, because I'm never long in a particular place I've had countless
neighbours; neighbours above and below me, neighbours on my right and
on my left, and sometimes at all four places together. I could easily
write the history of my neighbours; it would take a whole lifetime.
Admittedly it would be more the history of the symptoms they have
produced in me; but what they share with all such beings is that they
can be detected only in the disturbances they give rise to in certain
tissues .

I've had very unpredictable neighbours and very regular ones. I have
sat and tried to find out the principle of the first ones because it
was obvious that even they had a principle. And whenever my punctual
neighbours stayed out in the evening I've pictured to myself things
that could have happened to them and I've kept my candle burning and
worried like a young wife. I've had neighbours who were downright
hateful towards each other and neighbours who had become involved in
an intense love affair; and I've known one of them turn over to the
other in the middle of the night, and then, of course, sleep was out
of the question. One can make the general observation that sleep is by
no means as frequent as one thinks. My two neighbours in St.
Petersburg, for example, didn't set much store by sleep. One of them
played the violin standing and I'm sure that as he played he looked
across into the over-wakeful houses that never stopped being brightly
lit during those improbable August nights.

I know for a fact that my neighbour on the right lay in bed; while I
was there he never got up at all. He even kept his eyes closed; but
you couldn't say he was sleeping. He lay there and recited poems,
poems by Pushkin and Nekrassov, with the intonation children have when
they're asked to recite. And despite the music from my neighbour on
the left it was this neighbour with the poems who spun a cocoon inside
my head and God knows what would have crawled out of it if the student

who visited him occasionally hadn't one day got the wrong door. He
told me his friend's story, and in a way it proved reassuring. Anyway
it was a literal, unambiguous story which caused the teeming maggots
of my conjectures to perish.

This humble civil servant next door had the idea one Sunday morning to
solve a curious problem. He assumed that he would live for a very long
time, say another fifty years. The generosity he thus showed himself
put him in a splendid mood. But now he intended to surpass himself. He
reasoned that these years could be changed into days, into hours, into
minutes, and even (if you could bear it) into seconds; and he
calculated and calculated and came up with a figure such as he had
never before seen. It made him giddy. He needed a little time to
recover. Time is money he had always heard said, and it surprised him
that a man with such a lot of time wasn't guarded night and day. How
easily he could be robbed. But then his almost exuberantly good mood
returned: he put on his fur coat to appear somewhat broader and more
imposing and made a present to himself of the whole fabulous capital,
addressing himself a little condescendingly:

'Nikolai Kusmitsch, ' he said benevolently and imagined himself, still
the same but without the fur coat, thin and sickly on the horsehair
sofa, 'I hope, Nikolai Kusmitsch, that you won't let your riches go to
your head. You must always bear in mind that they're not the chief
thing, there are poor people who are thoroughly respectable; there are
even impoverished noble folk and generals ' daughters who go round the
streets selling things. ' And the benefactor gave him all kinds of
examples that were familiar all over the city.

The other Nikolaj Kusmitsch, the one on the horsehair sofa, the
recipient, didn't look the least bit full of himself; one could take
it that he was going to be sensible. In fact he made no changes to his
modest and regular way of life and he now passed his Sundays putting
his accounts in order. But after a few weeks he noticed that he was
spending an incredible amount. I'll economise, he thought. He got up
earlier, washed less thoroughly, drank his tea standing up, ran all
the way to the office, and arrived far too early. Everywhere he saved
a little bit of time. But on Sunday there was nothing left of all that
he'd saved. Then he saw that he'd been deceived. I shouldn't have
switched over, he told himself. How long one has in a year like this.
But this infernal small change, it just disappears, goodness knows
how. And one nasty afternoon he sat in the corner of the sofa awaiting
the gentleman in the fur coat from whom he would demand his time back.
He would bolt the door and not let him go until he'd coughed up. 'In
notes', he wanted to say. 'Ten-year ones, whatever. Four notes at ten
per cent and one at five, and he could keep the rest, devil take it. '
Yes, he was prepared to make him a present of the rest, so long as
there were no difficulties. Irritated he sat on the horsehair sofa and
waited, but the gentlemen didn't show up. And he, Nikolai Kusmitsch,
who, a couple of weeks previously, had seen himself sitting there
without a care in the world, was now, when he actually sat there,
unable to visualise the other Nikolai Kusmitsch, the one in the fur
coat, the magnanimous one. Heaven only knows what had become of him,
probably his fraud had been traced and he was now sitting in detention
somewhere. Surely it was not only on him that the man had brought
misfortune. Con men like him always operate on a grand scale.

It occurred to him that there must be some government bureau, some
kind of time bank where he could change at least part of his paltry
seconds. After all they were genuine. He'd never heard of such an
establishment but there would certainly be something of the kind in
the directory under ' T' or perhaps it was also called 'Bank for Time';
he could easily look under 'B' . Maybe he could also consider the
letter ' I ' for he assumed it was an imperial institution; that would
accord with its importance.

Later Nikolai Kusmitsch would always assure people that although he
was understandably in a very depressed mood that Sunday evening, he'd
not had a single drink. He was, therefore, completely sober when the
following incident took place, so far as one can really say what did
happen. Perhaps he'd drifted off for a few minutes in his usual corner

of the sofa, which would be most likely. At first this little nap
afforded him pure relief. I've been getting myself in a mess, he told
himself. It's just that I don't understand a thing about numbers. But
clearly they shouldn't be granted too much importance; they are, so to
speak, only some arrangement introduced by the government. Yet no one
has ever seen them anywhere except on paper. In a group of people it
was impossible to meet, for example, a seven or a twenty-five. There
simply aren't any. And that was how this slight mix-up had come about
through sheer absent-mindedness: time and money, as if you couldn't
tell them apart. Nikolai Kusmitsch nearly laughed. It was really good
to have found the flaw, and at the right time, that was the main
thing, at the right time. Now things would be different. Time, yes,
that was very embarrassing. But could he be the only one that this had
happened to? Didn't time pass for other people as well in the same way
he'd discovered, in seconds, even when they didn't know it?

Nikolaj Kusmitsch wasn't entirely free from enjoying other people's
misfortune: Anyhow, let it--, he was just about to think when
something peculiar happened. It suddenly wafted across his face, it
passed by his ears, he felt it on his hands. He opened his eyes wide.
The window was closed tight. And as he sat there in the dark room with
his eyes wide open he began to understand that what he was feeling now
was real time passing. He actually recognised all these seconds, all
tepid, uniform, but fast, fast. Heaven only knew what they still
intended to do. Why did it have to be him in particular to whom every
sort of wind felt like an insult? He would now sit there and it would
go on blowing ceaselessly his whole life long. He could foresee all
the attacks of neuralgia he'd get; he was beside himself with rage. He
jumped up, but the surprises weren't yet finished. Under his very feet
there was something like a movement, not just one but several strange
movements interlocking confusedly. He was rigid with terror: could it
be the earth? Certainly, it was the earth. Yes of course it moved.
He'd heard about it at school, but the topic had been dealt with
rather cursorily and later it had been readily hushed up as it wasn't
considered suitable for discussion. But now that he'd grown more
sensitive he could even feel it. Did the others feel it? Possibly, but
they gave no indication of it. Perhaps, being sailors, they didn't
mind. Of all people Nikolai Kusmitsch was somewhat sensitive on this
point, he avoided even the trams. He staggered about in his room as if
he were on deck and needed to to hold on right and left. Unfortunately
he recalled something else about the tilt of the earth's axis. No, he
couldn't bear all these movements. He felt ill. Lie down and rest he'd
read somewhere. And since then Nikolai Kusmitsch had been lying down.

He lay and kept his eyes closed. There were times, during the less
choppy days, so to speak, when it was quite bearable. And then to help
him he had thought up this procedure in regard to poems. It was
unbelievable how much it did help him. To recite a poem slowly,
maintaining a consistent stress on the end-rhyme, one produced, to a
certain extent, a kind of stability that was visible and gave one
inner understanding. By a happy chance he knew all the poems. But he
had always been especially interested in literature. I was assured by
the student who had known him a long time that he didn't complain
about his situation. Only, in the course of time an exaggerated
admiration had developed in him for those who, like the student,
walked around and endured the motion of the earth.

I remember this story in such precise detail because I found it
extraordinarily soothing. I can even say that I've never since had
such an agreeable neighbour as this Nikolai Kusmitsch who, to be sure,
would also have admired me.

Following this experience I resolved in similar cases to go straight
for the facts. I realised how simple and easy they were as opposed to
suppositions. As if I hadn't known that all our insights are entered
up later, settling our account, no more than that. Immediately
afterwards a totally different page begins, with nothing carried
forward. What are helping me now in the present case are the few facts
that have been child's play establishing them. I will list them the

moment I've explained my immediate concern: that these facts, if
anything, have increased the burden of my situation which (I admit)
was already very great.

It could be laid to my credit that I did a lot of writing in those
days: I wrote frantically. Mind you, when I went out I didn't like the
idea of coming back to the house. I even made slight detours and by
doing so lost half an hour during which time I could have been
writing. I admit, this was a weakness. But once back in my room my
conscience was clear. I wrote, I had my life and the life next door
was a totally different life, one with which I had nothing in common:
the life of a medical student who was was studying for his exams . I
had nothing like that before me; a distinct difference. And in other
ways our circumstances were as different as they could possibly be.
All of that was glaringly obvious to me. Until the moment when I knew
it would come; then I forgot that there was nothing we had in common.
I listened so hard that my heart started beating very loudly. I
stopped all I was doing and listened. And then it came: I've never
been mistaken.

Nearly everyone will be acquainted with the noise any round tin thing
makes--say, the lid of a tin--when it slips from your grasp. Usually
it doesn't actually make a very loud sound when it hits the floor;
just a short one before it rolls along on its edge and it doesn't
offend until it stops travelling forward and rocks and clangs before
coming to rest. Well, that's the whole story; some such tinny object
fell next door, rolled, then, after pitching about at certain
intervals, lay there. Like all sounds that assert themselves
repeatedly, this one too had its own internal organisation, it
modified itself, it was never exactly the same. But that spoke well
for its law-governed regularity. It could be violent or mild or
melancholic; it could, as it were, pass by in a rush, or glide as if
into infinity before it came to rest. And the final wobble was always
an unexpected surprise. By contrast the ensuing stamp that came right
at the end seemed almost mechanical. But it always had a different
time marking; that appeared to be its purpose. I'm now able to have a
much better overall view of these details; the room next to me is
empty. He's gone home, somewhere out in the country. He needed to
recuperate. I live on the topmost floor. To the right is another
building. No one has yet taken the room below me: I'm without a
neighbour .

This being the state of things it's almost surprising that I didn't
take the matter more lightly. Although my instinct warned me in
advance every time. I could have taken advantage of it. Don't be
frightened, I should have told myself, here it comes. I knew full well
I was never mistaken. But maybe the reason for that were the facts
that I'd been told about him; when I'd learnt them I became even more
nervous. Almost eerily the thought came to me that what triggered this
sound was the small, slow, silent movement with which his eyelid would
capriciously lower itself over his right eye and close while he was
still reading. This was the essence of his story, a trifle. He'd
already had to let exams go by a few times, he'd become touchy
concerning his ambition, and probably those at home were putting
pressure on him every time they wrote. What else could he do except
pull himself together. But a few months before a decision had to be
reached, this weakness became apparent; this stuff and nonsense about
being tired, was as laughable as a window blind that won't stay up.
I'm sure that for weeks he took the view that he should be able to
control it. Otherwise I would not have had the idea of offering my
will. You see, one day I realised that he had exhausted his own. And
after that, whenever I felt it coming I would stand at my side of the
wall and beg him to help himself to mine. And as time went on it
became clear to me that he was doing so. Perhaps he shouldn't have
done it, especially when one considers that it didn't actually help in
any way. Even assuming that we delayed matters a little it's still
questionable whether he was actually capable of making the best use of
the moments we had gained in this way. And as far as my expenditure of
will was concerned I was beginning to feel its toll on me. I know I
was wondering if things could go on as they were on the very afternoon
that someone arrived at our floor: this was because the narrow stairs

always caused a lot of disturbance in the small hotel. A while later
it seemed to me that someone was going into my neighbour's room. Ours
were the last doors on the landing; his at an angle to mine and right
next to it. I knew that friends of his occasionally called to see him
but I took no interest at all in his affairs. It's possible his door
opened several more times and that people came and went; I wasn't
actually responsible for that.

But later that evening it was worse than ever. It wasn't very late yet
but I'd been tired and had already gone to bed; I thought I'd probably
fall asleep. Then I woke up with a start; it was as if I'd been
touched. Immediately afterwards it broke out.

It leapt and rolled and ran into things and staggered and rattled. The
stamping was horrible. While this was happening someone on a floor
below was banging distinctly and angrily on his ceiling. Of course,
the new tenant also was upset. Just now: that must have been his door.
I was so wide awake I thought I heard his door, although he was being
amazingly careful. He seemed to be coming nearer. It's certain he
would be wanting to know which room the noise was coming from. But
what displeased me was his exaggerated consideration. He couldn't
have failed to notice, surely, that you wouldn't mistake this for a
quiet house. Why in the world was he softening his tread. For a while
I thought he was at my door; and then I heard him--there was no doubt
about it--going into the room next door. Without hesitating he walked
in.

And now (well, how can I describe it?) , now it became still. Still as
when a pain ceases. A strangely sensible, prickling stillness, like a
wound healing. I could have slept instantly; I could have breathed in
and gone to sleep. Only my amazement kept me awake. Someone was
speaking in the room next door, but this was also part of the
stillness. You need to have experienced what this stillness was like,
it's impossible to explain it. Outside too it was as if everything had
settled down. I sat up, I listened, it was like being in the country.
Dear God, I thought, his mother's here. She was sitting by the lamp
talking to him; perhaps his head was leant a little against her
shoulder. Soon she would be putting him to bed. Now I understood how
the footsteps outside in the passage came to be so soft. Ah, for this
to be. A being such as this, before whom doors give way as they don't
for the likes of the rest of us. Yes, now we could sleep.

I've already almost forgotten my neighbour. I can well see that it
wasn't real sympathy that I felt for him. Downstairs I do ask now and
then as I go by what news there is of him, if there is any. And I'm
pleased when there's good news. But I exaggerate: I don't really need
to know. The fact that sometimes I feel a sudden impulse to enter next
door no longer has any connection with him. It's only a step from my
door to the other and the room isn't locked. It would be interesting
to see what the room is really like. You can have a notion of what
some room or other looks like and as often as not be pretty close. The
room next door to one's own is the only kind that's totally different
from what one thinks .

I tell myself that this is what appeals to me in this case. But I know
full well that what is waiting for me in there is a certain tin
object. I've assumed that it's really all about the lid of a box,
though of course I may be mistaken. That doesn't worry me. It simply
accords with my disposition to put the blame on the lid of a box.
There's the thought that he didn't take it with him. Probably the
room's been tidied, the lid's been put on its can where it belongs.
And now they both together form the concept 'box', 'round box' to be
exact, a simple, very familiar concept. I seem to remember them
standing on the mantelpiece, these two parts that make up the box;
yes, even standing in front of the mirror so that behind it there's a
second box, one that's deceptively similar, imaginary. A box, totally
worthless to us but which a monkey, for example, would grab. Really
there would even be two monkeys grabbing for it, since the monkey
itself would be doubled as soon as it got to the edge of the

mantelpiece. So then it's the lid of this box that's had it in for me.

Let's agree on this: the lid of a box, of an undamaged box, whose edge
curves no differently from its own should be aware of no other desire
than to be on top of its box; this would have to be the very most it
could imagine for itself; an unsurpassable satisfaction, the
fulfilment of all its desires. What's more it verges on the ideal to
be patiently and gently turned round, steadily coming to rest on the
short length of projecting rim and feeling the interlocking edge
elastic and just as sharp as the brink is for you when you're lying
there on your own. Ah, but how few lids there are that can still
appreciate this. Here the confusion caused among things by associating
with human beings speaks for itself. You see, humans --if we're
allowed, simply in passing, to compare them with tin lids-- humans
sit on their occupations with the greatest reluctance and ill-humour.
Some because in their hurry they didn't land on the right one; some
because an agry person put them on crooked; some because the
corresponding rims have been buckled, each in a different way. Let's
be perfectly honest and say: basically they're thinking of only one
thing which is jumping down as soon as they can and roll about and
make tinny sounds. Otherwise where do all these so-called diversions
and the sounds they make come from?

For centuries now things have been looking on at them. Small wonder
that they're depraved, that they lose the taste for their natural,
deep purpose and want to exploit existence in the way they see it
exploited all around them. They make attempts to shirk their duties,
they become listless and slipshod, and people are not at all surprised
when they catch them running riot. People know that very well from
their own experience. They get annoyed because they are the stronger
ones, because they think they have more right to change because they
feel mimicked; but they let the matter go, as they let themselves go.

But where you have someone who pulls himself together, for example a
solitary person, who wants to be wholly content in himself day and
night it immediately provokes the opposition, the scorn, and the
hatred of of those degenerate items which, in bad conscience, can no
longer bear to think that something can actually keep itself together
and strive to follow its own significance . They join forces in order to
cause trouble, to frighten, to mislead, and they know that they can do
it. Winking to one another they begin their seduction which then grows
to immeasurable proportions and carries along with it all creatures
and even God himself against the solitary one, the one who will
perhaps survive: the saint.

How I understand now the strange pictures in which things of limited
and everyday use attempt to stretch out lecherously and inquisitively
to one another, twitching in the indiscriminate depravity of their
diversions. These vessels that go about boiling, these pistons that
are getting all sorts of ideas, and the idle funnels that, for their
pleasure, force their way into a hole. And there too, thrown up by the
jealous void, are limbs with organs among them and faces that vomit
warmly into them and windy rumps that add to their pleasure.

And the saint writhes and contracts; but in his eyes there was still a
look which conveyed the thought that this was possible; he had seen
it. And already his desires are being precipitated out of the pale
solution of his soul. Already his prayer is shedding its leaves and
showing itself in his mouth like a withered bush. His heart has
tumbled over and emptied itself into the gloom. The lash of his
scourge is as weak as a tail chasing away flies. His sex is once more
in one place only and when a woman holding herself erect comes forward
through the hustle with her naked bosom full of breasts it points at
her like a finger.

There were times when I thought these images antiquated. Not that I
had any doubts about them. I could imagine them happening now and
again to saints who were zealous and in a hurry, who wanted to begin
their life with God whatever it cost. We no longer expect so much from

ourselves. We suspect he's too difficult for us, that we must put him
off for a while so that we can take our time with the task that
separates us from him. I now know, however, that this task is as
fraught with difficulties as is sainthood; for that reason it appears
all round everyone who is solitary just as it shaped itself in the
past round God's solitaries in their caves and empty shelters.

Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted.
One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not.
They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without
knowing him. They've been his neighbours of his who who've used him
up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused
things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out.
Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at
every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They
tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout
his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow
himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came
forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he
didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and
breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself
became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were
a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they
were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was
their enemy.

But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They
suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to
act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him
separate himself from them for ever. And now they'd changed their
method and and were bringing to bear the ultimate form of opposition:
fame. And at this clamour practically everyone looked up and let
themselves be entertained.

Last night my thoughts turned again to the little green book that must
have been in my possession at one time when I was a boy; and I don't
know why I imagine that it had originally belonged to Mathilde Brahe .
It didn't interest me when I first got it and I didn't read it until
several years later at Ulsgaard one holiday time, I think. But it was
important to me from the first moment I saw it. It was filled with
references through and through, including its covers. The green of its
binding denoted something and you immediately understood that what was
written inside had to be as it was. As if it had been arranged
beforehand there came first the smooth white-in-watered white endpaper
and then the title page signifying mystery. There could well have been
illustrations inside but there were none and you had to concede,
almost reluctantly perhaps, that this too was perfectly in keeping. It
was a compensation in a way to find at a certain place the narrow
woven bookmark, worn and a little askew, touchingly confident that it
was still pink, lying as it had between the same two pages since God
knows when. Perhaps it had never been used and the bookbinder working
speedily had, without looking, caused it to slip into the pages. But
it's possible it wasn't accidental. It could be that someone had
stopped reading at that place, someone who had never returned to the
book; fate at that moment could have knocked on his door calling him
elsewhere where hed be kept busy far from all his books, which, after
all, are not life. You couldn't tell if more of the book had been
read. But it could also be that it had been opened again and again at
this place and that this had happened at whatever time, sometimes
until late into the night. Anyway, looking at the two pages made me
feel shy with the sort of shyness you get standing in front of a
mirror. I never read the two pages. I don't actually know if I read
the whole book. It wasn't very thick but there were lots of stories in
it, especially in the afternoon; then there was always one I didn't
know.

I remember only two of them. I'll say which they are: 'The End of
Grisha Otrepyov' and 'Charles the Bold's Downfall'.

God knows if it made any impression on me at the time. But now after
so many years I still remember the description of how the corpse of
the false Tsar was thrown among the pile of others and lay there for
three days torn to pieces with stab wounds all over and a mask on its
face. Of course there isn't the faintest prospect of the little book
ever coming into my hands again. But this marked passage must have
been remarkable.

I would also have liked to re-read the passage that told of his
meeting with his mother. He must have felt very secure because he let
her come to Moscow; I'm even convinced that he believed in himself so
strongly at that time that he thought that it was in fact his mother
he was summoning. And this Marie Nagori, who arrived from her
miserable convent after travelling at great speed for three days, had
indeed everything to gain by giving her assent. But didn't this
uncertainty stem from the very fact that she acknowledged him? I'm not
disinclined to believe that the power of his transformation came from
his no longer being anybody's son.

[Written on the margin of the MS :

That, in the end, is the strength of all young people who have left

home . ]

The fact that the people wanted him and had no other in mind left him
all the more free and less restricted in his possibilies. But the
mother's declaration, even if it was a conscious deception still had
the power to diminish him; she lifted him out of the richness of his
invented self, she it confined him to a tired imitation; she reduced
him to the individual he had not been; she turned him into an
impostor .

And now in addition there was this Marina Mniczek who, breaking him
down more quietly, denied him in her own way, as it later proved, by
believing not in him but in anyone. I can't possibly say, of course,
to what extent all that was taken into account in the stories but it
seems to me that all of it should have been told.

But even apart from that what occurred has not aged at all . Time now
perhaps for a narrator, one who would handle the last moments with
great care; he wouldn't be wrong doing so. There's lots of things
happening: as when from deepest sleep he jumps to the window and
through it into the courtyard and the guards. He can't get to his
feet; they have to help him. It's likely his foot is broken. Leaning
on two of the men he has the feeling that they believe in him. He
looks around: the others believe in him too. They almost feel sorry
for him, these enormous streltsy; how things must have changed: they
had known Ivan Grozny in all his reality, and they now they believe in
him. He would have tried to explain but if he opened his mouth he
would simply let out a scream. The pain in his foot is driving him mad
and he thinks so little of himself at the moment that he's conscious
of nothing except the pain. And then there's no time left. Others are
forcing their way in; he can see Schuisky and all those behind him. It
will be over quickly. But now his guards close round him. They're not
going to give him up. And a miracle happens. The faith of these
old men spreads; suddenly there is no one who wants to step forward.
Schuisky, right in front of him, in desperation calls up to an upper
window. The impostor doesn't look round. He knows who's standing
there. He realises silence will fall, it will happen abruptly. Now the
voice will come that he knows from former times; the high, false voice
that overstrains itself. And then he hears the Tsarina Mother
repudiate him.

This far the story has told itself, but now, please, a narrator, a
narrator: because from the few lines remainingn there has to come
forth a mighty force that will transcend any opposition. Whether or
not it's been said, you must swear that between voice and pistol shot,
infinitely compressed, there was once again inside him the will and
power to be everything. Otherwise people don't understand how
brilliantly consistent it is that they bored through his nightshirt
and stabbed him all over as if they were trying to strike the hardness
of a person. And that in death he wore the mask for three whole days,

the mask he had almost already dispensed with.

When I think about it now, it seems strange to me that in this same
book the tale would be told of the last days of a man had been one and
the same all his life, hard and unchangeable like granite and weighing
more and more heavily on all those who could put up with him. There's
a picture of him in Dijon. But he was known, anyway, to be short,
thick-set, truculent and prey to despair. His hands are perhaps the
only thing about him that we might not have thought of. They're
terribly warm hands that are constantly trying to cool themselves and
of their own accord, fingers outspread with air between them, they
come to rest on anything that's cold. His blood could shoot into these
hands as it might rush up into another's head; and when clenched they
were actually like the heads of madfolk raging with crazy notions. It
took an unbelievable amount of caution to live with this blood. The
Duke was locked in with it inside him and at times when it wandered
around, dark and crouching, he was afraid of it. Even to him it could
seem to be gruesomely alien, this agile half-Portuguese blood he
scarcely knew. He was often frightened it might attack him as he slept
and tear him to pieces. He pretended it had been subdued but he always
stood in fear of it. He never dared love a woman lest it became
jealous; and so rapacious was it that wine never passed his lips;
instead of drinking he pacified it with rose-leaf jam. But he did
drink once, when he was in camp at Lausanne following the loss of
Granson; he was ill at the time and on his own and he drank a lot of
undiluted wine. But that was when his blood was asleep. In his useless
last years he would sometimes fall into this heavy bestial sleep. It
then became clear how great was its power over him; for when it
stopped he was nothing. Then none of the people he had around him was
allowed to enter; he didn't understand what they were talking about.
Being so dull meant he couldn't show himself to foreign envoys,
receive foreign envoys. He'd sit and wait for it to awaken. And more
often than not it would run and jump up and burst out of his heart and
bellow.

For the sake of this blood he dragged around with him all the things
that didn't matter to him. The three large diamonds and all the
precious stones; the Flemish lace and the Arras tapestries all in
piles. His silken tented pavilion with its spun-gold cords and the
four hundred tents for his retinue. And pictures painted on wood and
the Twelve Apostles all in silver. And the Prince of Tarent and the
Duke of Cleve and Phillip von Baden and the Master of Chateau-Guyon .
Because he wanted to make his blood think he was emperor and that
there was nothing above him: so that it would fear him. But his blood
didn't believe him, despite all proofs of this kind; for it was a
mistrustful blood. Perhaps he kept it in doubt for a while longer. But
the Horns of Uri gave him away. From that time onwards his blood knew
it was inside a lost man and it wanted to leave.

That's how I see it now but back then what impressed me most was
reading that it was the Day of Epiphany when they went to look for
him. searched for him.

The young Lorrainian prince, who on the previous day, straight after
his remarkably hurried battle had ridden in to his wretched city of
Nancy, had wakened the entourage and asked for the Duke. Messenger
after messenger was dispatched and the Prince himself from time to
time appeared, restless and anxious, at the window. He didn't always
recognise those who were being fetched in on carts and stretchers, he
only saw it wasn't the Duke. He wasn't among the wounded and no one
had seen him among the prisoners who were constantly being led along.
Refugees gave varying reports on all sides and were confused and
easily startled as if they were afraid of running into him. It was
already growing dark and nothing had been heard of him. During the
long winter evening the news that he had disappeared had time to
spread. And wherever it went it produced in everyone a sudden
exaggerated confidence in his still being alive. Never, perhaps, as on
that night had the Duke been so real in everyone's imagination. There
wasn't a house where people weren't awake, waiting for him and

imagining his knock on the door. And if he didn't come it was because
he had already gone by.

It froze that night and it was as if the idea that he was still alive
had frozen as well, so firm it was. And years and years went by before
it melted away. Without proper knowledge of the facts, all these
people were now insistent that he was alive. The fate he had brought
upon them was made bearable only by means of his image. It had been
hard for them learning that he continued to be; but once they had done
that they found it easy to keep him in their minds and not forget.

But, all the same, the next morning, the seventh of January, a
Tuesday, the search began again. And this time there was a guide. It
was one of the Duke's pages and he was said to have seen, from a
distance, his master fall; now he was to show them the place. He
himself had said nothing, the Duke of Campobasso had brought him and
had spoken for him. Now he was walking in front and the others kept
close behind him. Anyone looking at him now, muffled up and oddly
unsure of himself would have had trouble believing that it was
actually Gian-Battista-Colonna, the page who was as beautiful and
slender-limbed as a young girl. He was shivering with cold; the air
was stiff with the night frost, and underfoot the snow sounded like
teeth grinding together.

Indeed they were all freezing. Only the Duke's fool, known by the
nickname of Louis-Onze, kept himself on the move. He pretended to be a
dog, running on ahead, coming back, and toddling along for a while on
all fours close to the boy; but whenever he saw a corpse in the
distance he bounded across to it, bent over and told it to pull itself
together and be the one they were searching for. He gave it a little
time to consider, then made a sullen return to the others, threatening
and cursing and complaining about the stubbornness and lethargy of the
dead. Thus they kept on walking on without any sign of an end. The
city could hardly be seen for in the meantime, despite the cold, bad
weather had closed in, and the air had become grey and dense. The
countryside lay flat and indifferent and the little close-knit group
looked to be straying the further it moved along. No one spoke; there
was just one old woman who had kept up with them, muttering something
and shaking her head; perhaps she was praying.

Suddenly the one furthest ahead stood still and looked around. Then he
turned abruptly to Lupi, the Portuguese doctor, and pointed to
something in front. A few steps further on there was a stretch of ice,
a kind of pond or pool and in it, half fallen through the ice lay ten
or twelve bodies . They were almost completely stripped of their
clothes and belongings . Lupi went from one to the other bending over
and examining them. And now Olivier de la Marche and the chaplain
could be seen doing the same separately. But the old woman was already
kneeling in the snow and whimpering as she bent over a large hand
whose rigid splayed fingers gaped at her. All the rest came running
over. Lupi with some servants tried to turn the body over because it
was lying on its front. But the face was frozen into the ice and when
they dragged it out one cheek, thin and brittle, peeled away and one
could see that the other cheek had been torn off by dogs or wolves,
and the whole head had been split by a large wound that ran from ear
to ear so that there was really no face to speak of.

One after another the men looked around, each thinking to find the
Roman behind him. But they only saw the fool who came running towards
them angry and bloodstained. He was holding out a cloak and shaking it
as if expecting something to fall out of it; but the cloak was empty.
So they set about searching for any known markings, and some were
found. They had made a fire and had washed the body in warm water and
wine. The scar on the neck appeared and the locations of two large
abscesses . The doctor was no longer in any doubt. But they still
looked for other confirmations. A few steps further on Louis-Onze had
discovered the carcase of Moreau, the large black stallion the Duke
had ridden that day from Nancy. He was astride it with his short legs
hanging down. Blood was still running from his nose into his mouth and
one saw that he was tasting it. One of the servants across the other
side remembered there was an ingrowing toenail on the Duke's left

foot; now everyone looked for the nail. But the Fool wriggled as if he
itched and cried out: 'Ah, Monseigneur, forgive all these idiots for
revealing your unsightly blemishes and for not recognising you in my
long face where your virtues abide. '

[Written on the margin of the MS :

The Duke's Fool was also the very first to see the corpse when it was
laid out. It was in the house of a certain Georg Marguis, though no
one knew why. The pall had not yet been put on so he was able to take
in the whole scene. The white of the doublet and the crimson of the
cloak stood in harsh and forbidding contrast with the two blacks of
canopy and couch. Placed in front pointing towards him were scarlet
highboots with their large gilded spurs . And that up there was a
head--no disputing that when you saw the crown on it. It was a large
ducal crown with some kinds of precious stones . Louis-Onze walked
about and had a close look at everything. He even felt the satin
although he understood very little about it. It could be good satin,
perhaps a tiny bit cheap for the House of Burgundy. He stepped back to
survey the whole scene one more time. In the light coming off the snow
the colours were in a strange way at odds with one another. He
committed every single feature to memory. 'Well arranged, ' he said in
a final acknowledgement, 'perhaps a touch too obvious. ' Death seemed
to him like a puppeteer in sudden need of a duke.]

Without regretting facts or even simply judging them one does well,
with certain things, simply to recognise that they're not going to
change, ever. An instance is my realising that I was never a proper
reader. As a child it seemed to me like a profession to be taken up
sometime later when one by one all the professions came to be
considered. To tell the truth I had no particular idea when that might
be. I relied on being able to tell when life turned about, so to
speak, and came only from outside just as it had previously come from
inside. I imagined it would then become clear, unambiguous with no
misunderstandings possible. Definitely not simple; on the contrary,
very demanding, complicated and, as far as I'm concerned, difficult,
but always visible. Then I would have been able to withstand the
strange unconfined world of childhood, its lack of proportion, it's
never foreseeing properly. True, I can't actually see how I could have
done it. Basically it kept on increasing and closed itself off on all
sides and the more I looked outside the more I stirred up what was
inside me. God knows where it came from. But it probably grew to its
furthest limits and then, at a stroke, ceased. It was easy to see that
grownups were only slightly disturbed by it. They went round judging
and dealing with matters and whenever they got into difficulties they
put it down to external circumstances.

As well as other things I put off reading to the time when such
changes should start to happen. When the time came I would treat books
as I treated friends: there would be time for them, a definite,
regular and pleasant allocation of time, exactly as suited me.
Naturally there would be some who were closer to me than others, and
this is not to say that I could be sure of not being delayed by them,
now and again, for half an hour when I was going for a walk, keeping
an appointment, arriving in time at the theatre or writing an urgent
letter. The chances of a person's hair being put out of shape and
tousled as if he'd been lying on it, of his ears becoming burning hot
and his hands as cold as metal, of a large candle beside him burning
down into the candlestick--all were, thank God, completely out of the
guestion.

I cite these aspects because I experienced them personally and in
rather striking ways during those holidays at Ulsgaard when I so
suddenly took to reading. It was obvious rightaway that I couldn't do
it. Admittedly I'd begun reading before the time I had originally
planned. But the year I spent at Soro among nothing but boys of
roughly my own age had made me distrustful of such calculations. There
were a number of rapid, unexpected experiences that caught up with me,
and it was clear that the other boys treated me as a grownup. The
experiences were as large as life and made themselves as heavy as they

were. But to the same degree that I understood their actual truth, my
eyes also opened to the boundless reality of my childhood. I knew it
wouldn't cease just because the other was beginning. I told myself
that everyone was free to make dividing lines but that they were made
up. And it turned out that I wasn't clever enough to think it out for
myself. But if I insisted that my chilhood was past then at the same
moment all that is coming is also gone and I'm left with no more to
stand on than a tin soldier has .

Understandably, making this discovery isolated me even more. It
preoccupied me inside myself and filled me with a kind of final joy
which I took to be sadness because it was way beyond my years. It also
unsettled me, I remember, to think that, since nothing was destined
for me for a definite period of time, there were so many things that I
could miss entirely. And so, when I returned to Ulsgaard and saw all
the books, I pounced on them in a real hurry and with an almost bad
conscience. At that time I somehow had a presentiment, which I so
often felt later on, that we didn't have the right to open a book if
we weren't committed to reading all of them. With every line you broke
off a piece of the world. Before books the world was unharmed and
perhaps in time it would be whole again. But how could I, unable to
read, be a match for them all? There they stood, in such a hopeless
bulk even in that modest library. Defiant and desperate I flung myself
from book to book and fought my way through the pages like one who has
to carry out a task that ' s too big for him. During that time I read
Schiller and Baggesen, Ohlenschlager and Schack-Staf f eldt , whatever I
could find by Walter Scott and Calderon. Many a book that came into my
hands were ones that, one might say, I should have read already, while
for other ones it was still too early; there was almost nothing
contemporary. And I read on regardless.

In later years it occasionally happened that I would wake in the night
and the stars that were out would look so real, making their way so
meaningfully that I couldn't understand how people could bring
themselves to miss so much world. So similar was the feeling I had, I
think, whenever I looked up from the books and glanced outside where
summer was and where Abelone was calling me. It came as a great
surprise to us both that she should be calling and that I didn't even
answer. It was in the middle of our most blissful time together. But
because it was then that reading first held me in its grip I clung
desperately to it and in my self-importance I obstinately hid myself
away from our daily holidaying. Unskilled though I was at taking
advantage of the many and often homely opportunities to enjoy a
natural happiness, I promised myself, not reluctantly, future
reconciliations from our growing discord, reconciliations that were
becoming all the more charming the longer they were postponed.

As it happened, one day my reading sleep ended as suddenly as it had
begun; and then it was we made each other thoroughly angry. For
Abelone didn't spare me any of her ridicule and superiority and
whenever I met her in the summerhouse she would make out she was
reading. One particular Sunday morning her book was next to her and in
fact it was closed but she seemed inordinately occupied with the
redcurrants which she carefully stripped from their little clusters
with a fork.

It must have been one of those early mornings that July brings— hours
when things are rested and there's something joyful and spontaneous
happening everywhere. Millions of small irrepresible movements collect
in the most convincing mosaic of Being; things leap and merge into one
another and soar high in the sky, and their coolness makes the shadows
distinct and gives the sun a light spiritual appearance. In the garden
there is nothing that stands out from the rest, the effect is overall
and you need to be in everything and to not miss any of it.

And the whole scene was played out again in Abelone 's natural little
movements. There was such a happy inventiveness in what she did and
and likewise in the way she worked. Her hands looked bright in the
shade and worked together so easily and knowingly; the round berries
leapt mischievously from the fork into the bowl lined with dewhazed
vineleaves, adding to the others already piled there, red ones and

white ones, glistening, the seeds intact within the tiny tart globes.
All I wanted then and there was just to stand and watch; but since I'd
likely be told off and also because I wanted to appear casual, I
grabbed the book, sat down at the other side of the table and without
leafing through it for too long picked a place at random.

'You could at least read out loud, bookworm, ' said Abelone after a
while. The tone was no longer quite so querelsome and since, in my
opinion, it really was time we made up I immediately began to read out
loud, going to the end of a section and continuing to the next
heading: 'To Bettina'.

'No, not the replies, ' said Abelone interrupting me, and all of a
sudden, as if she were exhausted, she set the fork down, following it
straightaway with a laugh when she saw the way I was looking at her.

'My God, but you read that badly, Malte.'

I had to admit that not for a moment had I followed what I was
reading. 'I was only reading so that you'd interrupt me, ' I confessed,
becoming hot, and turning back to the title page of the book. It
wasn't until then that I knew what it was. 'Why not the replies?' I
asked, curious.

It seemed as if Abelone hadn't heard me. She sat there in her bright
dress as if she were becoming quite dark inside her: as dark as her
eyes were becoming.

'Give it to me, ' she said suddenly as if in anger, and took the book
out of my hand and opened it right at the page she wanted. And then
she read one of Bettina 's letters.

I don't know how much of it I understood but it was as if I'd received
a formal promise that one day I would understand it all. And while her
voice grew until eventually it was almost the same voice I knew from
her singing, I was ashamed that my scheme for our reconciliation had
been so weak. For I well understood that it was. But now it was
happening on a grand scale somewhere far above me, somewhere beyond my
reach .

The promise is still fulfilling itself; at some time or other that
same book turned up among my books, among the few that I never part
with. Now it opens for me too, at the very places I'm thinking of, and
when I read them I can't make my mind up if I'm thinking of Bettina or
of Abelone. No, Bettina is the one who has become more real in me;
Abelone, who I knew, was like a preparation for her and for me now she
had disappeared into Bettina as if into her own instictive self. This
strange Bettina, with all her letters, had brought space, had given
form measureless space. From the start she had spread herself out
whole as if she had died. She had put herself deeply everywhere into
being, had become part of it and no matter what happened to her was,
in her nature, from eternity; it was where she recognised herself and
detached herself from it, almost with pain; she took trouble to guess
her way back as if she were revisiting like an enduring spirit.

There you were just now; I can recognise you. Isn't the earth still
warm from you and don't the birds still leave room for your voice? The
dew is a different dew but the stars are still the stars of your
nights. And isn't the world altogether yours? For how often have you
set it on fire with your love and seen it blaze and burn itself out;
and how often have you secretly, while everyone slept, replaced it
with another. You felt so fully in harmony with God when every morning
you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could
have its turn. It seemed small-minded to keep them and repair them;
you used them up and held out your hands for more worlds. For your
love had grown in all ways .

How is it possible that the story of your love is still not on
everybody's lips? What has happened since then that was more

extraordinary? What are they busying themselves with? You yourself
knew the value of your love; you shouted it from the rooftops to your
greatest poet so that he would make it human for it was still
elemental. But by writing to you he led people away. They have all
read his answers and believe them more because the poet is more
recognizable to them than is nature. But someday, perhaps, it will be
shown that they mark the limit of his greatness. This woman in love
was imposed upon him and he couldn't match up to her. What does it
mean, his not being able to respond to her love? It contains both call
and answer; it answers to itself. But he should have humbled himself
before her in all his finery and should have written what she dictated
with both hands like John on Patmos on his knees . But there was no
choice in respect of this voice that 'served the angel's part' and had
come to enfold him and take him away into eternity. Here was the
chariot for his fiery ascension. Here, prepared against his death was
the dark myth he left empty.

Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty dwells in
its complexity. But life itself is hard because of its simplicity. It
has only a few things whose magnitude is beyond our measure. The
saint, while rejecting Fate, chooses them for his godly purpose. But
the fact that the woman, following her own nature, must make the same
choice with regard to the man, calls up the catastrophe inherent in
all love relationships: determined and fated like an immortal, she
stands beside the one who is transformed. The woman who is in love
always surpasses the man she loves because life is greater than fate.
Her devotion wants to be immense: this is her bliss. But the nameless
sorrow of her love has always been this: that what is asked of her is
that her devotion be kept within limits .

Women have poured out their sorrow for no other reason: Helolse's
first two letters of contain only this, and five hundred years later
it rises from the letters of the Portuguese nun; it's as recognisable
as a bird-call. And suddenly through the bright space of this
knowledge passes the remotest figure of Sappho whom the centuries
never found because they looked for her in fate.

I have never dared to buy a newspaper from him. I'm not sure he always
actually has copies with him when he moves slowly back and forth all
evening outside the Jardin de Luxembourg. He turns his back to the
railings and his hand rubs along the stone coping from which the bars
rise. He makes himself so flat that every day people go past and never
see him. True, he still has what's left of his voice and he calls out
to remind people of this, but it's no different from the sound from a
lamp or a stove or from drips falling at odd intervals in a cave. And
the world is ordered in such a way that there are people who, their
whole life long, go past in the intervals when he, making less sound
than anything that moves continually like the hands of a clock, like
shadows, like time.

How wrong it was of me to be reluctant to look at him. I'm ashamed to
write that when I approached him I adopted the way other people
walked: as if I didn't know he was there. Then I heard something
inside him say 'La Presse' and say it again immediately after that and
then a third time, rapidly with hardly a breath between. And the
people near me looked about them trying to locate the voice. My own
reaction was to hurry on, leaving the others behind, as if I hadn't
noticed anything, as if I were greatly preoccupied.

As in fact I was . I was busy picturing him in my mind and the the
sweat from the effort was running off me. For I had to construct him
as they construct a dead man for whom there is no evidence are no
remains proofs, no integral parts, absolutely nothing to go on. I know
now that it helped me a little to remember all the many figures of
Christ made from striated ivory that had been taken down and that lie
around in all antigue shops. The memory of some or other Pieta came
and went--: all no doubt to help me recall a certain tilt of the long

face, the grim stubble in the shadows of his cheeks, and the
definitively painful blindness of his locked expression that slanted
upwards. But, nevertheless, there was so much that belonged to him;
for even then I could tell there was was nothing trivial about him:
not the way his jacket or his coat stood away from the back of his
neck and let his collar show all the way round--that low collar, that
formed a wide arc round his stretched and pitted neck without touching
it; not the greenish black tie hanging slack all the way round; and
especially not the hat, an old high-crowned stiff felt hat which he
wore the way all blind men wear their hats : bearing no relation to the
lines of the face and without the possibility of deriving anything
from this and developing for themselves a new outward unity; but no
different from any old accepted deviation. My cowardly refusal to look
at him grew to such a pitch that eventually the image of this man,
often for no cause at all, severely and painfully contracted inside me
into to such a harsh misery that, driven by this, I resolved to scare
and get rid of the increasing skill at imagining things that were
foreign to me. It was getting towards evening. I would immediately
walk past him and take a good look at him.

Now it's important to know that it would soon be Spring. That day the
wind had died down, the streets were long and contented; at the end of
each street houses gleamed, looking as new as fresh cuts into a white
metal. But it was a metal that surprised you by its lightness. In the
wide endless roads there were throngs of people moving almost
fearlessly among the vehicles, which were very few. It must have been
a Sunday. The topmost parts of the towers of St.Sulpice stood out
cheerfully and unexpectedly high in the still air and through the
narrow, almost Roman streets you couldn't help looking out into the
season. Inside the Luxembourg Gardens and in front there was so much
movement that I didn't see him rightaway. Or was it that I didn't
recognise him at first through the crowd.

I knew immediately that my picture of him was worthless. His very
abandonment to poverty, unconfined by any wariness or feigning, went
beyond my scope. I had understood neither the angle at which his head
inclined nor the horror with which the inside of his eyelids filled
him. I had never given a thought to his mouth which was drawn in like
a drain spout. He may possibly have had memories but now there never
came anything into his soul other than the shapeless feel of the
stonework that trailed behind him and wore away at him. I had stopped
and all the while I was watching everything almost simultaneously, I
sensed that he was wearing a different hat and a necktie that
doubtless was kept for Sundays; it had a diagonal pattern of yellow
and violet checks, and as for the hat, it was a cheap new straw hat
with a green band. The colours, of course, are of no account and it's
small-minded of me to have remembered them. I just want to say that on
him they were like the softest down on a bird's front. He himself got
no pleasure from the colours, and whoever among all the people there
(I looked around me) could have thought that this finery was for their
sake?

My God, I thought impetuously, so you exist, then. There are proofs of
your existence. I have forgotten them all and have never even wanted
them, for what a dreadful obligation would lie in your own certainty.
And yet that's what's being indicated to me now. This is what you
relish, what you take pleasure in. That we learn to endure everything
and not to judge. What are the difficult things? What are the gracious
things? Only you know that.

When it's winter again and I need a new coat — grant that I wear it
like that for as long as it ' s new.

It ' s not that I want to draw a distinction between me and them when I
walk around in better clothes--that were mine from the beginning— and
insist on having some place to live. It's that I haven't got as far as
they have. I haven't the courage to live their kind of life. If my arm
withered I think I'd hide it. But she (apart from this I don't know
who she was) , she appeared every day in front of the cafe terraces and

although it was very hard for her to take off her coat and extricate
herself from the blur of various clothes beneath, she didn't spare
herself the time or trouble of slowly removing one article after
another even though the anticipation was scarcely bearable. And there
she stood, in front of us, modestly, with her dried, wasted stump and
you could see it was something rare.

No, it's not that I want to set myself apart; but I would be
considering myself superior if I tried to be like them. I'm not. I
would have neither their strength nor their measure. I keep myself fed
and from one meal to the next I don't make a secret of what I'm doing;
but they keep themselves alive as if they were immortals . They stand
at their daily corners, even in November, and don't cry out when
winter comes. The fog comes and makes them hard to see so you're not
sure: they're there, nevertheless. I went on a long journey. I fell
ill, a lot of things happened to me; but they haven't died.

[Written on the margin of the MS:

I don't even know how it's possible for schoolchildren to get up in
little rooms full of grey-smelling cold; who keeps giving them the
strength, these tumbling skeletons, to run out into the grown-up city,
into the cheerless dregs of the night, into the everlasting school
day, still small, full of foreboding, always late. I can't imagine the
huge amount of help that is constantly being consumed.]

The city is full of others who are slowly sliding down to their level.
Most are reluctant at first; but then there are these fading, ageing
girls who constantly let themselves go over the edge without
resisting, strong girls, still unused in their innermost selves, who
have never been loved.

Perhaps, Lord, you mean me to leave everything and go love them.
Otherwise why is it so difficult for me not to follow them when they
pass me in the street? Why do I suddenly invent the sweetest, most
nocturnal words, and why does my voice settle sweetly inside me
between my throat and heart? Why do I imagine how I, with unutterable
caution, would hold them to my breath, these dolls that life has been
playing with, flinging their arms apart springtime after springtime
for nothing, and again for nothing, until they became slack in the
shoulders. They've never fallen from a very high hope, so they're not
broken; but they're badly chipped already and too far gone. Only stray
cats come to them in the evening in their rooms and keep giving them
furtive scratches and then sleep on top of them. Sometimes I follow
one of them down a couple of streets. They walk past the houses,
people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on
fading until they are nothing.

And yet I know that if someone was loving towards them, they would
weigh upon him like people who have walked too far and are going to
stop. I believe only Jesus could bear them, he who still has
resurrection in all his limbs but he's not interested in them. Only
women in love tempt him, not those who wait with a small talent for
being loved, as it is with a lamp that has turned cold.

I know that if I'm destined for the highest things, then it won't help
me in any way to disguise myself in my better clothes. When he was in
his kingdom did he not float down to be amongst the lowest? He, who
instead of rising sank all the way to the bottom. It's true that at
times I've believed in other kings although their parklands don't
prove anything any more. But it's night, it's winter, I'm freezing, I
believe in him. For glory lasts only for a moment and we have never
seen anything more lasting than wretchedness. But the King shall
endure .

Isn't he the only one who bore up beneath his madness like wax flowers
under a glass cover? They prayed for others in the churches that they
might have long lives, but Chancellor Jean Charlier Gerson demanded
that he have eternal life and that was when he was already the
neediest one, ill and living in abject poverty, despite his crown.

It was in the days when, from time to time, men, strangers with
blackened faces, would pounce upon him in his bed in order to tear off
his shirt which had rotted into his ulcers that for a long time now he
had regarded as part of himself. In the room the darkness had deepened
and they ripped off the putrid tatters from under his stiff arms.
Then one of them brought a light and it was only then they discovered
the suppurating wound on his chest where the iron amulet had sunk in
because every night he would force it in with all his strength; it was
now deeply embedded, this awful priceless thing edged with pearls of
puss like a miraculous remnant in the hollow of a religuary. Hard-
bitten fellows had been picked but they weren't inured to the sight of
maggots, disturbed, rearing up and reaching across to them from the
Flemish fustian and dropping from the folds started to work up their
sleeves. Without a doubt he had got into a worse state since the days
of the 'little queen' for she, young and clear-headed as she was,
still wanted to lie by his side. Then she died and now no one dare put
another bedfellow beside this rotting carcass. She'd bequeathed to no
one the words and tendernesses with which she had soothed the king.
There was no one whose voice could now be heard in the wilderness of
his mind, no one to help him out of the ravines of his soul, no one
who could understand when he suddenly walked out of them of his own
accord, feasting his eyes like an animal going to pasture. And when he
recognised the pre-occupied face of Juvenal he was reminded of the
kingdom and how it had been before. And he wanted to make good that
which he had neglected.

But in keeping with those times nothing was spared when events were
retold. When something happened it happened with full force and was
all of a piece with other things that were spoken of. How could you
cancel out the fact that his brother had been murdered; that yesterday
Valentina Visconti, whom he had always called his sweet sister, had
knelt before him and had done nothing more than lift her veil away
from the lament and accusation that disfigured her face. And today a
tenacious and verbose lawyer had stood for hours and had proved that
the princely murderer had been justified to the point where the
blemish of a crime became a transparency and seemed like a bright
light heavenbound. And justice meant allowing everyone to be in the
right; for Valentina von Orleans died of grief although she had been
promised revenge. And what was the use of pardoning the Burgundian
duke only to pardon him again; and for weeks now, visited by the
rutting passion of despair he had been living in a tent deep in the
Forest of Argilly and declared that what gave him relief was having to
listen to the deer belling in the night.

If one had thought about it, over and over right to the end, brief as
it was, people craved to see a person; and see him they did:
perplexed. But people were gladdened by the sight; they realised that
this was the King: this quiet, patient man who was there only to let
God in His overdue patience have sway over him. In his lucid moments
on the balcony of his palace at Saint-Pol, perhaps the King had
inklings of the secret progress he had made; he would remember the day
at Roosbeke when his uncle, the Duke of Berry, had taken him by the
hand and had led him to the site of his first out-and-out victory;
there in the strangely prolonged November light he surveyed the bodies
of the Ghentians so tightly massed together that they were choked by
the cavalry attacks from all sides. Intertwined with one another like
an enormous brain they lay there in the clumps they had formed in
order to keep tightly together. It took one's own breath away to see
their smothered faces; one couldn't help imagining the air being
driven far above these huddled upright bodies by the sudden expulsion
of so many despairing souls.

This had been impressed upon him as the beginning of his glory. And it
stayed with him. But if that battle had been the triumph of death,
standing here like this, weak in the knees but upright in the view of
everybody: this was the mystery of love. He had seen that to others
this battlefield, immense as it was, could be understood. But this
scene here refused to be understood; it was just as marvellous as the
stag with the golden collar that he had seen all that time ago in the
Forest of Senlis. Except that now he was the apparition and others'

eyes were upon him. And he didn't doubt that they were breatless and
had the same broad expectations that had overtaken him as a youth out
on a day's hunting when that calm face had eyed him as it came out of
the branches. The miracle of his materializing was spread all over his
gentle form; he didn't stir for fear of fading away; the thin smile on
his broad, simple face took on a natural permanence as if it were on
the stone statue of a saint and need not trouble itself to move. That
way he held out and it was one of those moments that are eternity writ
small. The crowd could hardly bear it. Nourished and strengthened with
an inexhaustible and increasing consolation it broke through the
silence with its cry of joy. But on the balcony above only Juvenal des
Ursins was left and he shouted into the next lull in the shouting from
the crowd that the King would be coming to the Passion Brotherhood in
the rue Saint-Denis to see the mysteries.

On days like this the King's consciousness was filled with a gentle
awareness. Had a painter of that time been searching for some clue as
to what being in paradise looked like he couldn't have found a more
perfect model than the still figure of the King as it stood beneath
the curve of its shoulders in one of the high windows of the Louvre.
He was leafing through the little book by Christine de Pisan, which is
called 'The Way of Long Study' and was dedicated to him. He wasn't
reading the scholarly polemics of that allegorical parliament which
had set itself the task of finding the prince worthy to rreign over
the world. The book always opened for him at the simplest passages:
where it spoke of the heart which for thirteen years had been like a
retort over the fire of pain which had served only to distil the water
of bitterness for the eyes; he understood that true consolation only
began when happiness was sufficiently faded to be gone forever.
Nothing was dearer to him than this solace. And while his gaze
seemingly embraced the bridge beyond he loved to see the world through
Christine ' s heart which had been seized by the powerful Cunaean and
taken along the great pathways of heaven; he loved to see the world as
it was at that time: seas to be ventured upon, strangely towered
cities shut tight by their remoteness, the ecstatic solitude of the
assembled mountains and the skies that were explored in fear and doubt
and were only now closing like an infant's skull.

But whenever anyone entered the room the King gave a start, and his
mind slowly receded. He was content for them to lead him away from the
window and give him something to do. They'd got him used to spending
hours at a time going over illustrations and he was satisfied with
that; only one thing piqued him: it was that when he turned the pages
he could never have a number of pictures together in front of him
because they were all bound into the folios and couldn't be moved
about. Then someone remembered a pack of playing cards that had been
completely forgotten and the King indicated his royal pleasure to the
man who brought it; so dear to his heart were these individual pieces
of card that were full of images done in bright colours. And although
card-playing became the custom among courtiers, the King sat in his
library and played alone. Just as he now turned up two kings, side by
side, so God had recently brought him and Emperor Wenzel together;
sometimes a queen died and then he would put an ace of hearts on her
like a gravestone. It didn't surprise him that there were several
popes in this game; he set Rome over by the edge of the table and here
on his right was Avignon. Rome didn't interest him, for some reason or
other he imagined it to be round and left it at that. But Avignon was
somewhere he knew. And no sooner had the thought occurred t him when
his memory— before it overtaxed itself— showed him again the lofty
hermetic palace. He closed his eyes and needed to take a deep breath.
He feared he would have bad dreams that night.

But on the whole it was a soothing occupation and they were right to
keep bringing him back to it. The hours spent like this confirmed him
in the view that he was the King, he was King Charles VI. That is not
to say that he was exaggerating his own importance; he was far from
thinking that he was anything more than one of those pieces of card;
but he had a growing certainty that he too was a particular card--
perhaps a bad one, one that had been played in anger, and that always
lost: but always the same card: never any other. And yet, when a week
had gone by, steadily gaining confidence like this, he began to

experience inside him a feeling of restriction. There was a tightness
around his forehead and in the back of his neck as if he suddenly felt
his own too-defined outline. No one knew what temptation he was
yielding to when he then asked about the mysteries and could hardly
wait for them to begin. And once that time had arrived he lived more
in the rue Saint-Denis than in his palace at Saint-Pol.

What was fateful about these dramatic poems was that they continually
added to and extended themselves so that time in them eventually
became real time; rather as if someone were to make a globe as big as
the earth. The hollow podium, with Hell beneath, had above it built
onto a pillar and denoting the level of Paradise, the unbalustraded
framework of a balcony which only served to weaken the illusion. For
that century had in fact made heaven and hell earthly; it lived by the
power of both so that it might survive its own self.

Those were the days of Avignonese Christendom when, a generation
before, so many followers in involuntary need of refuge had gathered
around John the Twenty Second, that at the site of his pontificate,
immediately after his arrival, the mass of this palace had been
built, closed and heavy like a protective outer body for all the
homeless souls. But he himself, this small, slight, spiritual old man
still lived out in the open. He had scarcely arrived when he began
without delay to deal with matters on all sides swiftly and summarily,
and all the while, there appeared on his table dishes of food spiced
with poison; the first cup always had to be tipped out since the piece
of unicorn was discoloured when the cupbearer took it out again. The
seventy year old man was at a loss; he had no idea where to hide the
wax images that his enemies had made so they could destroy him; he was
also being scratched by the long needles that were stuck through them.
They could be melted down; however, he had been so horror-stricken by
these secret simulcra that against his powerful will he found himself
several times thinking that such an action might be fatal for him and
that he could disappear like the wax in the fire. Horror made his
shrunken body drier still and more durable. But now it was the body of
his empire that was being attacked; from Grenada the Jews had been
incited to kill off all Christians and this time they had hired
mercenaries of a more terrible kind. Right from the very first rumours
no one doubted the plot by the lepers; already several people had seen
them throwing horrible decomposing bundles into the wells. It wasn't
due to any credulity on their part that people immediately thought it
possible; faith, on the other hand, had become so ponderous that it
had dropped from those shivering hands and gone straight to the very
bottom of the wells . And once again the zealous old man had to keep
poison away from his blood. During his bouts of superstition he had
prescribed the Angelus for himself and his entourage to ward off the
demons of twilight; and now every evening across the whole agitated
world the bells rang out for that calming prayer. With the exception,
however, of all the bulls and epistles he sent out which were more
like spiced wine than herb tea. The empire had not committed itself to
his care for treatment; but he didn't tire of inundating it with
proofs of its sickness; and already people from the farthest east
consulted this imperious physician.

But then the incredible happened. On All Saints Day he had preached
longer and more fervently than usual; prompted by a sudden need to
look over it again himself he had revealed his faith; he had lifted it
slowly with all his strength out of its eighty-five years old
tabernacle and had exhibited it in the pulpit. They had all yelled at
him. All Europe yelled out: this was a poor faith.

Then the Pope disappeared. For days no instructions were issued by
him; he kept to his prayer room, remaining on his knees and exploring
the mystery of those who by their actions do harm to their souls.
Eventually he reappeared, exhausted by his arduous self-examination,
and recanted. Time and again he recanted. It became the senile passion
of his mind to recant. It wasn't unheard of for him to wake the
cardinals in the night so that he could talk with them about his
repentance. And perhaps what kept him alive well beyond his allotted
span was, in the end, simply the hope even then of humbling himself
before Napoleon Orsini who hated him and would not come.

Jakob von Cahors had recanted. And one might think that God himself
had wanted to prove the Pope's error, because so soon afterwards he
took to himself that son of Grafen von Ligny who seemed to await his
coming-of-age on earth only so that he could take up the soul's
sensuous pleasures as a grown man. There were many still living who
could remember this serene boy when he was in his cardinalate and
could recall how, at the beginning of his adolescence, he was made
bishop and died in an ecstasy of fulfilment when he was barely
eighteen. One still met those who had been brought back to life: for
in the air at his graveside there was pure life that had become free
and had a long-lasting effect on corpses. But wasn't there something
desperate even in this precocious saintliness? Wasn't a wrong done to
everyone by the way the clean fabric of this soul, which had had only
a brief immersion in life, was dyed in the intense scarlet of the time
to make it shine? Didn't it feel something like a counter-thrust when
this young prince leapt from this earth into his passionate ascension?
Why didn't these givers of light go and live among the toiling
candlemakers? Wasn't it this darkness that had brought John XXII to
declare that before the Last Judgement there can be no perfect bliss
anywhere, not even among the blessed? And indeed, how much self-
opinionated determination did it take to imagine that, while such
dense confusion existed here, somewhere there were already faces
bathed in the light of God, leant on angels and calmed by the
inexhaustible vision of Him.

Here I sit in the cold night, writing, and knowing all this. I know it
perhaps because I met that man when I was little. He was very tall,
I'd even say he must have been strikingly tall.

Unlikely as it may be, I'd somehow managed some time towards evening
to get away from the house by myself; I was running; I turned a corner
and at the same instant I ran straight into him. I don't understand
how what had occurred at that moment could take place within about
five seconds. The telling of it, however concisely, takes much longer.
I had hurt myself colliding with him; I was little and I felt I
already deserved a lot of praise for not crying; naturally I also
expected to be comforted. As he wasn't doing that I supposed he was
embarrassed. I took it that he couldn't think of the right sort of
joke that would relieve the situation. I was quite happy to help him
but that would have meant looking him in the face. I've said he was
tall. Now, he hadn't bent over me which would have been the natural
thing to do; he stayed at the height I couldn't deal with. In front of
me was nothing but the smell and the peculiar hardness of his suit,
which I had felt. Suddenly his face appeared. What was it like? I
don't know. I don't want to know. It was the face of an enemy. And
next to this face, right next to it, at the same height as his
terrifying eyes, like a second head was his fist. Before I even had
time to lower my face I had already taken to my heels, slipping away
to the left and down this empty, horrible street in a city I didn't
know, a city where nothing was ever forgiven.

It was then that I experienced what I now understand: that heavy,
massive, desperate period in time. That age when the kiss of
reconciliation between two men was simply the signal for the murderers
stationed about. They drank from the same cup, mounted the same horse
while everyone looked on, and the news spread how they would be
sleeping in the same bed that night: but with every contact their
distaste for each other was so strong that whenever one of them saw
the pulsing veins of the other a sickly revulsion caused him to jerk
backwards as if he'd seen a toad. The age when brother attacked
brother and held him prisoner because of the other's larger share of
their inheritance; true, the King interceded on behalf of the ill-
treated younger brother and managed to get his freedom and property
restored to him; and the elder brother occupied, as fate would have
it, with matters far away, sent him greetings of peace and in his
letters repented of the wrong he had done. But after all that had
happened the freed man was never himself again.

The century slows him in pilgrim's clothes, wandering from church to
church making up wondrous vows. With amulets hanging from his neck he
whispered his fears to the monks of Saint-Denis and for a long time
their records showed the hundred-pound wax candle that he had thought
good to dedicate it to Saint Louis. He didn't get to have a life of
his own; to the day he died he felt his brother's jealousy and anger
as a warped constellation above his heart. And that Count de Foix,
Gaston Phoebus, whom everyone admired— hadn ' t he openly killed his
cousin Ernault the English King's captain at Lourdes? Yet what was
this patent act of murder compared with the terrible accident that
occurred because he hadn't put his sharp little penknife down before
allowing his famously beautiful hand, now all a-twitch with reproach,
to graze the bare throat of his sleeping son? The room was dark; they
needed light to see the blood that had come from so far and was now,
as it stole away from the tiny wound on this exhausted boy, leaving a
magnificent lineage for ever.

Who could be strong and refrain from murder? Who in that age didn't
know that one couldn't avoid the extreme? Some place a strange
presentiment would come over a man whose glance during the day had met
the gauging glance of his murderer. He would withdraw and shut himself
in, would write his will, ending with directions for a litter of woven
willow twigs, the habit of a Celestine monk, and the scattering of
ashes . Strange minstrels appeared in front of his castle and he paid
them royally for their singing which was in accord with his vague
forebodings. The dogs, looking up at him, showed doubt in their eyes
and they were becoming less confident in reading his wishes. From the
motto that had held good for him all his life there gently emerged a
newer, clearer second meaning. Many longstanding habits appeared to
have lost their relevance but there didn't seem to be any others
developing that could replace them. Whenever plans were drawn up he
dealt with them without really believing in them; on the other hand,
certain acts of remembrance took on an unexpected finality. In the
evening at the firesideone thought of abandoning oneself to them. But
the night outside that no one knew any more all at once sounded quite
loud in one ' s ears . The ear that was experienced in so many free or
dangerous nights distinguished individual pieces of the silence.

And yet this time it was different. Not the night between yesterday
and today: a night. Night. Beau Sire Dieu, and then the Resurrection.
Praisings of a loved one scarcely reached him at times like these: for
him the women were all turned out in aubades or the submissive songs
of troubadours, now incomprehensible with their long, convoluted showy
calls. Best suited to the dark, like the full feminine, upward gaze of
a bastard son.

And then, before the late supper, this pensiveness over the hands in
the silver washbasin. One's own hands. Could a coherence be conveyed
to them? An ordered sequence to reaching for things or leaving them
be? No. Everyone tried both the part and the counterpart. The one
cancelled the other. There was no line of action.

The only exception were the missionary brothers. When the King had
seen how they conducted themselves he devised the charter for them
himself. He spoke of them as his dear brothers; never had anyone
affected him so deeply. They were given verbal permission to go in
their own guise among the worldly; for the King wished for nothing
more than that they might infect many others with their zeal and draw
them enraptured into their powerful movement where order dwelt. As for
himself, he so longed to learn from them. Didn't he wear, exactly as
they did, the symbols and clothes that held meaning? When he watched
them he found it possible to believe that these things might be
learned: how to come and go, how to speak out and how to turn away so
that no one could be in any doubt. Enormous hopes spread across his
heart. Every day he sat in the best seat in the fitful light of the
strangely characterless hall of the Hospital of the Trinity and he
would stand up out of sheer excitement and then pull himself together
in the way schoolboys do. Others wept but he was inwardly filled with
shining tears and pressed his cold hands together only to bear it all.
Sometimes at heightened moments when one of the card players left the
game and suddenly stepped out of his wide gaze, the King lifted up his

face and was afraid: how long had he been there: Monseigneur Saint
Michel, up there, had advanced to the edge of the scaffolding in his
dazzling silver armour.

At moments like this he would sit bolt upright. He would look around
as if he were trying to make a decision. He was very close to seeing
the counterpart to this sort of dramatic action: the great, uneasy,
profane passion play he acted in. But suddenly it was gone. Open
torches came towards him, throwing their formless shadows onto the
vaulted ceiling. Men unknown to him were tugging at him. He wanted to
act his part but nothing came from his mouth, his movements produced
no actorly gestures. People were crowding around him so oddly that it
occurred to him that he should be carrying the cross . And he wanted to
wait for them to bring it. But they were stronger and slowly they
pushed him out .

Outside much has changed. I don't know how. But within and before
thee, Lord, within and before thee, Thou who looks on: are we without
a line of action? We indeed discover that we don't know our role; we
look for a mirror, we'd like to remove our make-up and take off all
that's false and become real. But somewhere there's still a piece of
our disguise clinging to us that we've forgotten about. There's a
trace of exaggeration on our eyebrows; we don't notice that the
corners of our mouths are twisted. And this is how we go around, an
absolute laughing-stock: neither a real being nor an actor.

It was in the amphitheatre at Orange. Without taking a proper look
upwards and being aware only of the rustic cleft that now locates the
facade, I had entered by the caretaker's little glass door. I found
myself among bodies of columns lying on the ground and small althaea
trees, but it was only for a moment that they hid from me open mussel
shell of the sloping auditorium lying there divided by the afternoon
shadows like a gigantic concave sundial. I quickly went towards it. As
I climbed between the rows of seats I felt how I was diminishing in
this setting.

A little further up a few foreigners were standing around, poorly set
out, idly curious; their clothing was unpleasantly eye-catching, and
its quality wasn't worth discussing. For a while they looked straight
at me, astonished at my smallness. That made me turn round.

Oh, I was totally unprepared. A play was being performed. A huge,
superhuman drama was in progress, the drama of this vast backdrop
which had three roles in that it resounded with grandeur, was almost
annihilating, and suddenly brought to scale what was excessive.

I was carried away by a joyful alarm. Towering there with the face-
like arrangement of its shadows gathered at the centre in the dark of
its mouth, and bordered above by cornices adorned with a wreathed
symmetry of coif fed curls. This was the all-disguising mask of
antiquity behind which the world fits together as a face. Here in this
great inward-curving seating space reigned an expectant, empty,
intaking entity: everything took place across there: gods and fate.
And from there (looking upwards) came, lightly, over the topmost part
of the wall, the never ending entrance of the sky.

That hour, I realise now, turned me away from our theatres for ever.
What am I supposed to do in them? What should I do in front of a
stage-set where this wall (the icon screen in Russian churches) has
been dismantled because the strength is no longer there to press
through its hardness the gaseous plot that comes out in big, heavy,
drops of oil.

Nowadays plays now fall in lumps through the torn coarse sieve of the
the stages and pile up and cleared away when there's enough. It's the
selfsame raw reality that lies around on the streets and in houses
except that more of it gathers there than would fit into a single
evening.

[Written on the margin of the MS :

Let's be frank, we don't have a theatre, any less than we have a God:
for those you need community. Everyone has special ideas and fears of
their own and reveal only so much of them to others as they need to or
as suits them. We're continually diluting our understanding just so
there's enough to go round instead of wailing our common needs towards
the wall behind which the incomprehensible would have time to gather
its strength and exert it.]

Were we to have a theatre would you, woman of tragedy, stand there
again and again—so slender, so pure, as yet so unmoulded--in front of
those who delight their hurried curiosity with the pain you display?
You move us in ways we cannot express, you foresaw the reality of your
own suffering that time in Verona when, appearing on the stage while
you were almost still a child all you simply held roses before your
face like a mask meant to hide your new stature.

It's true, you were a child of the theatre and whenever your parents
performed they wanted to be seen; but that was not your way. This
profession was to become for you what becoming a nun was, without her
knowing it, for Marianna Alcoforado, a disguise, dense and
sufficiently lasting to be relentlessly miserable behind, yet with the
fervour with which invisible blessed ones are blest. In all the cities
you came to people would describe your gestures; but they didn't
understand how you, growing helpless daily, held a poem up in front of
you to see if it might hide you. You held your hands, your hair or
anything opaque in front of where you shone through. You breathed on
those places; you made yourself small; you hid the way children do,
and then you gave that short, happy outburst and nothing lower than an
angel should have been allowed to look for you. But next, when you
looked up cautiously there was no doubt that they had watched you the
whole time, all of them in that ugly, hollow space filled with eyes:
you, you, you, and nothing else.

I can still clearly remember once, long ago, at home, finding a jewel
case; it was the size of a couple of hands, fan-shaped, with a border
of flowers stamped into the dark green morocco leather. I opened it:
it was empty. I can tell this now it's so long past. But at the time I
opened it I saw only what its emptiness consisted of: there was
velvet, a small mound of light-coloured velvet that had lost its
newness; and there was the empty jewel groove running through leaving
around it a hint of a lighter melancholy. For a moment one could bear
it. But for those who are in love and who are left behind, it is
perhaps always thus .

Leaf back in your diaries. Wasn't there always a time around spring
when the burgeoning year had a reproachful effect on you? There was a
desire in all of you for happiness and yet, when you stepped out into
spacious freedom there was something displeasing in the air and your
steps were unsure as if you were on a ship. The garden was beginning
but you (that was it) you dragged winter in as well as the year that
had gone; for you it was at best a continuation. While you were
waiting for your soul to take part, you suddenly felt the weight of
your limbs; and something like the possibility of becoming ill entered
your open anticipation. You put it down to your dress being too thin;
you drew your shawl round your shoulders; you ran down the allee to
the end, then you stood, your heart pounding, in the wide turning-
circle, determined to be at one with it all. But a bird-call sounded,
and was alone, and denied you. Ah, should you have been dead?

Perhaps. Perhaps what is new is that what we survive are: the year and
love. Flowers and fruit are ripe when they fall; animals go by what
they feel, and they find each other, and are satisfied with that. But
we who resolved to have God for ourselves, we can never finish. We
throw off our nature; we need more time. What is a year to us? What
are they all? We who began God ages ago, we are still praying to Him:
see us safely through the night. And then illness. And then love.

That Clemence de Bourges had had to die in the dawn of her life. She

who was without equal; she who knew how to play instruments like no
one else could make the most beautiful of them play unforgettably by
the least sound of her voice. Her girlhood was one of such high
resolve that one woman bounteously in love could dedicate to this
rising heart the book of sonnets in which every line was unfulfilled.
Louise Labbe wasn't afraid of frightening the child with her woeful
accounts of love. She depicted the nightly heightening of her longing;
she promised pain as if it were a wider world and suspected that the
grief she herself had experienced would remain far behind the grief
that was darkly anticipated and gave the young girl her beauty.

Girls where I grew up. Say the most beautiful one among you had gone
on a summer afternoon into the darkened library and had found the
little book printed by Jan des Tournes in 1556. Say she took the cool
polished leather volume out into the humming orchard or over to the
phlox in whose oversweet scent can be found a residue of pure
sweetness. Say she came upon the book early. In the days when her eyes
are beginning to take note of what they see, while her younger mouth
is still capable of biting from an apple pieces that are far too big,
and be full.

And then when the time of more emotional friendships comes along, it
could be your secret, girls, to use the names Dika Anaktoria, Gyrinno
and At this with one another. It might be a neighbour, an older man
who travelled about when he was young and has long been regarded as an
eccentric who betrays these names to you. Perhaps he sometimes invites
you to his house to taste his famous peaches or to view upstairs in
the white corridor his Ridinger equestrian engravings that are so much
talked about that one had to have seen them.

Perhaps you'll persuade him to tell you stories. There may be one
among you who can get him to bring out his old travel diaries, who
knows? This same girl may one day coax him into revealing that several
fragments of Sappho's poetry have come down to us and the girl can't
rest until she knows what is almost a secret: that this man who lives
a secluded life liked now and then in his leisure time to turn to
translating these pieces of verse. He has to admit that for a long
time now he hasn't given them a thought and that what there is, he
assures her, isn't worth mentioning. Still, if they really want him
to, he'll happily recite a stanza to these guileless friends. He even
discovers he remembers the Greek text and recites it because the
translation doesn't capture, in his opinion, the meaning and because
he wants to show these young people the beautiful authentic fragment
of this massive adorned language, fashioned in such strong flames.

All of this fans his love for his subject once more. Evenings become
beautiful again and for him they could almost be the evenings in his
youth, autumn evenings, for example which prelude hours and hours of
peaceful night. Then the light burns long in his study. He doesn't
stay bent over the pages all the time, he often leans back and closes
his eyes over a line he has re-read and its meaning spreads through
his blood. Never had he been so sure of antiquity. He might almost
smile at the generations that mourned it like a lost play in which
they would have liked to act. Now, he instantly understands the
dynamic significance of that early world unity which was something
like a new simultaneous incorporating of all human labours. He's not
deterred by the fact that the consistent culture with its almost total
openness appeared to many later eyes to form a whole, a whole that was
wholly past. To be sure, in those days the ethereal half sphere of
life did really fit that of existence and the two coming together
formed one golden ball. Yet hardly had this happened when the spirits
locked inside it felt that this entire achievement was nothing more
than a comparison; the massive orb lost substance and rose into space
and its golden curve dully reflected the sadness of everything that
still could not be coped with.

As he is thinking this, thinking and understanding it, the lonely man
in his night notices a plate of fruit on the window-seat.

Unconsciously he takes an apple and puts it in front of him on the
table. He thinks: How my life is around this fruit. Around everything
that is complete rises what is still to be done and adds to itself.
And then beyond what is not done there arises before him, almost too
quickly, the small figure that reaches out into infinity, the figure,
whom (according to Galen's testimony) they all thought of when they
said ' the poetess' . For in the same way that, after the labours of
Heracles, the demolition and rebuilding of the world came about
because it was earnestly desired, so too the ecstasies and despairs,
which future ages would have to address, thronged to the deeds of her
heart to be given life.

All of a sudden he knows this resolute heart that was prepared to let
the whole of love have its way to the last. It doesn't surprise him
that people failed to recognise it: in this woman in love who was so
very much the future they saw only excess, not the new measure of love
and heart sorrow. It doesn't surprise him that they interpreted the
inscription of her existence with exactly the same conviction it
carried at the time, in that they finally included her death with the
deaths of those women whom the god incites, individually, to pour
themselves out in a love that is not returned. Perhaps even amongst
the girls she had tutored there some close to her who didn't
understand: that at her prime she lamented not one who had left her
embrace empty but the one who was no longer possible, the one who had
grown by their love.

At this point the meditating man stands up and crosses to his window;
his high-ceilinged room is too close for him, if it were possible he'd
like to see the stars. He has no delusions about himself.

All of a sudden he knows this resolute heart that was prepared to let
the whole of love have its way to the last. It doesn't surprise him
that people failed to recognise it: in this woman in love who was so
very much the future they saw only excess, not the new measure of love
and heart sorrow. It doesn't surprise him that they interpreted the
inscription of her existence with exactly the same conviction it
carried at the time, in that they finally included her death with the
deaths of those women whom the god incites, individually, to pour
themselves out in a love that is not returned. Perhaps even amongst
the girls she had tutored there some close to her who didn't
understand: that when in her prime she lamented not the one who had
left her embrace empty but the one who was no longer possible, the one
who had grown by their love.

At this point the meditating man stands up and crosses to his window;
his high-ceilinged room is too close for him, if it were possible he'd
like to see the stars. He has no delusions about himself. He knows
he's being led by emotion, because among the young girls of the
neighbourhood there's one who matters to him. He has wishes (not for
himself, but for her) ; at some fleeting moment in the night he
understands the claim that love is making. He promises himself to say
nothing of this . It appears to him the finest thing is to be by
himself, wakeful, and thinking, on her account, how very right that
woman in love had been in her knowledge that sexual union can have no
meaning other than an increase in one's loneliness; that her breaking
through the temporal aim of sex had an infinite purpose of its own;
that in the depths of an embrace she delved not for satisfaction but
for yearning; that she scorned the notion of one being either the
lover or the loved; that before they left her, she had led the weak
loved ones to her couch and imbued them with the ardour of lovers. By
such noble partings her heart became part of Nature. She sang the
bridal song about fate to her more mature favourites; exhalted their
nuptials; exaggerated the qualities of the approaching bridegroom so
that they might prepare themselves for him as for a god and might
survive even his splendour.

In recent years, Abelone, there was one occasion, when, unexpectedly,
I felt your actual presence and understood you, even though you had
not been in my thoughts for a long time.

It was in Venice, in autumn, in one of those salons where foreign
visitors foregather around a hostess who is as foreign as they are.
These people stand about with their cup of tea and are delighted
whenever a well-informed fellow-guest turns them swiftly and
discreetly towards the door and whisper a name that sounds Venetian.
They're ready for the most outlandish names; nothing can surprise
them, for limited as their experience may be, in this city they
blithely surrender to the most extravagant possibilities. In their
normal day-to-day lives they are forever confusing what is
extraordinary and what is forbidden, but here they grant themselves
the expectation of something wonderful, which appears on their faces
as an expression of coarse licentiousness. What might come over them
only fleetingly at home--say at a concert or when quietly reading a
book--they now, in this flattering setting, make show of as if by
entitlement. Similarly, being unprepared for and ignorant of any
danger they allow themselves to succumb to almost baneful musical
outpourings as if they were yielding to a physical indiscretion, and
thus they deliver themselves to the rewarding swoon of the gondola
ride without coping in the least part with Venetian life. Couples, no
longer newlyweds, who have spent their entire journey making nothing
but spiteful exchanges now settle into a companionable silence; the
pleasant fatigue of his ideals descends on the man while the woman
feels young and nods cheerily to the indolent locals, giving them
smiles as if she had teeth of sugar that were continually dissolving.
And if you were to catch what was said, it turns out they are leaving
tomorrow, or the day after, or at the end of the week.

I now stood there among them, glad not to be leaving. It would shortly
turn cold. The soft, opiate Venice of their preconceptions and
requirements disappears with these somnolent foreigners, and one
morning the other Venice is there, the real Venice, wideawake, brittle
enough to shatter, not in any way the stuff of dreams, willed into
being in the midst of the void, on sunken forests, finally forced into
being here and now. The toughened body, stripped of inessentials,
through which the ever wakeful arsenal drove the blood of its toil;
and the spirit of this body which, more penetrating, incessantly
expanding, was stronger than the fragrance of aromatic lands. The
influential State which exchanged the salt and glass of its poverty
for the treasures of nations. It is to the world's a counterweight of
beauty and even within its ornamentation The beautiful counterweight
to the world that even its ornamentation is full of latent energies
that branch out ever more finely like nerves—this Venice.

The realisation that I knew this came over me when I was in the midst
of all these self-deluding people and so made my hackles rise that I
looked up to see how I might somehow convey what was in me. Was it
conceivable that in these rooms there wasn't a single person, who,
without knowing it was waiting to be enlightened about the essential
nature of his surroundings? Some young person who would immediately
understand that what was being offered here wasn't a delight but an
example of will-power more demanding and severe than could be found
anywhere else. I walked around, my truth had made me restless. Because
it had taken hold of me here among so many people, it brought with it
the the desire to have it expressed, defended, proved. I had this
grotesque notion in my head that in the next moment I would clap my
hands out of hatred for all their chattering misunderstanding.

It was while I was in this ridiculous mood that I noticed her. She was
standing by herself in front of a window that was flooded with light,
observing me, not really with her eyes which were serious and
thoughtful but actually with her mouth which was ironically imitating
the unmistakably annoyed expression on my face. I immediately felt the
impatient tension in my features and affected a look of calm.
Whereupon her mouth reverted to its natural haughtiness. Then, after a
brief moment of reflection we smiled at each other.

She brought into my mind, incidentally, a certain early portrait of
the beautiful Benedicte von Qualen who played a role in Baggensen's
life. It was impossible to note the depth of stillness of her eyes
without presuming her voice to have a deep clarity. Moreover, the
braiding of her hair and the style of the neckline of her dress were

so very Copenhagen that I made up my mind to speak to her in Danish.

But before I could get closer a stream of people had pushed towards
her from the other side of the room; our warm-hearted Countess,
carried away by her own delight, dashed over to her, accompanied by a
number of those present, and led her off there and then to sing. I was
sure the young girl would excuse herself by saying that no one in the
company could be interested in listening to songs in Danish. And as
soon as she got the chance to speak that is what she said. The crowd
round this shining figure urged her all the more; someone knew she
also sang in German. 'And in Italian, ' a laughing voice added with
malign satisfaction. I don't know any excuse that I might have wished
her to offer--but doubtless she would have resisted it anyway. It was
when looks of dry-eyed offence were already appearing among the faces
of the petitioners, now released from their prolonged smiling; and
when the good Countess, to save herself embarrassment, had already
taken a step back, sympathetically and with dignity, and when it was
no longer at all necessary, that the young woman gave in. I felt
myself grow pale with disappointment; reproach was written all over my
face; but I turned away; there was no point letting her see. However,
she broke away from the others and all of a sudden was at my side. Her
dress shone onto me, the flowery scent of her warmth was around me.

'I really want to sing, ' she said in Danish along my cheek, 'not
because they want me to; not for appearance's sake: but because now I
must sing . '

In her words one could hear the selfsame vicious intolerance from
which she had just freed me.

I slowly followed the group that were leading her away. But I kept at
the back by a tall door, allowing people to shift around before
finally settling themselves. I leant against the black mirroring
surface of the inner door and waited. Someone asked me what was
happening, whether there was going to be any singing. I pretended not
to know. Even as I told my lie she had already begun to sing.

I couldn't see her. There was getting to be a space around one of
those Italian songs which foreigners take to be the real thing because
they so clearly follow conventions. And she who sang didn't believe in
it. It was an effort for her to deliver it; her singing was far too
laboured. One could tell it was over by the applause that came from
the front. I was sad and ashamed. People began moving about and I
decided that as soon as anyone left I would do the same.

But suddenly the room fell silent. It was a silence that a moment
before one wouldn't have thought possible; it went on, it intensified;
and there rose from within it her voice. (Abelone, I thought,
Abelone.) This time the voice was strong and full and not at all
heavy; all of a piece, no break, seamless. It was an unknown German
song. She sang it in a way that was both simple and strange, as if it
were something vital. She sang:

'You, whom I do not tell
I lie weeping
In the night,
Lulled by your being,
Like a child in a cradle.
You do not tell me when it wakes,
for my sake:

What if this glory grew in our hearts
And was not silent. '

(short pause and then hesitantly) :

'See: with lovers
When they start to confess,
How soon they tell lies.'

Again stillness. God knows who started it. Then people stirred,
jostled one another, apologised, coughed. They were already thinking

about joining in a general blurring of what had been heard when
suddenly her voice burst forth, resolute, unconfined, urgent:

'You leave me by myself alone

But from the merest rustling

Or wafted fragrance I can create you.

In your arms everything falls from me

But you alone are born anew.

I do not cling to what is already in my heart. '

I almost believe so when I consider how women in love as naive as
Mechthild, as passionate as Teresa of Avila, as wounded as the Blessed
Rose of Lima, could swoon with relief, knowing they were in God's care
and were loved. Ah, He who was a helper to the weak is an injustice to
the strong such as they; when they were expecting nothing save an
unending road there reappeared a known figure coming out to meet them
in the thrilling forecourt of Heaven, cosseting them with lodgings and
distracting them with masculinity. His heart's powerful refracting
lens brings together once more the already parallel rays coming from
theirs, and they whom the angels hoped to preserve intact for God
flame up in the dryness of their longing.

[Written on the margin of the MS:

To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is: giving light
with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to
endure . ]

Nevertheless it's possible that in later years Abelone tried to think
with her heart so as to enter directly and unobtrusively into
relationship with God. I could imagine there being letters from her
reminiscent of the considerate introspection of Princess Amalie
Gallitzin; but if these letters were addressed to someone she'd been
close to for years how pained he may have been by the change in her.
And she herself: I suspect she feared nothing except the ghostly
alteration which we in fact fail to take note of because all evidence
of it seems so utterly foreign that we let it pass.

It is difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is
not the legend of one who didn't want to be loved. When he was a child
everyone in the house loved him. He grew up knowing nothing different
and, being a child, he grew accustomed to their tenderness of heart.
But once he became a youth he wanted to cast all that aside. He
wouldn't have been able to say it, but even when he spent the whole
day wandering around outdoors he didn't want the dogs with him ever
again because they loved him as well; because looking in their eyes he
could read watchfulness, sympathy, expectation, and concern; because
when they were with him there was nothing he could do that didn't
either delight them or hurt their feelings. But what he was aiming for
at the time was that indifference of heart which early in the morning
out in the fields sometimes seized him inwardly and with such purity
that he would start to run in order to leave himself no time or breath
to be more than a weightless moment in the morning's returning
consciousness .

The mystery of his yet-to-be life spread itself out before him. For no
reason he would guit the footpath and go on through the fields, his
arms outstretched as if he were able to cope with several directions
at once. And then he would fling himself down somewhere out of sight
and no one would care a j ot about him. He would peel himself a flute,
or fling a stone at a small predator, or bend down and force a beetle
to turn around: none of this could count as destiny, and the sky
passed over him as it passed over all nature. Eventually afternoon
came and with it the chance to let his fancy roam; one could be a
buccaneer on the island of Tortuga, and still be free of any
obligation to actually be one; one could lay siege to Campeche, or
capture Vera Cruz; one could be an entire army or a leader on
horseback, or a ship at sea: whatever one felt like being. If it came
into one's head to kneel, in a trice one was Deodat von Gozon and had
slain the dragon and still hot from the struggle, had seen that his

act of heroism lacked obedience and was really haughtiness . For one
omitted nothing regarding subject matter. And, however much rein one
allowed one's imagination, there were always intervals when one could
simply be a bird, without specifying which kind. Then it was time to
go home .

Dear God! --how much there was to cast aside and forget; for it was
right to forget; it was necessary; otherwise one would give oneself
away if one were questioned closely. No matter how much one tarried
and looked around, the gable eventually came into view. The topmost
window gazed down; someone may well have been standing there. The dogs
in whom expectation had been growing all day, tore through the shrubs
and hustled one back into the figure they kept in their heads. And the
house did the rest. One needed only to step into the fullness of its
aroma for most things to be as they should be. Trivial matters could
still change; but in all, here one was the person one was always taken
to be; the one for whom they had long since structured a life out of
one's small past and their own desires; the being they all shared and
who day and night was subordinate to the influence of their love,
between their hope and their doubt, their censure and their applause.

There's no point taking infinite care climbing the steps. They'll all
be in the sitting room, and the door has only to open for them to see
him. He remains in the dark, anticipating their questions. But then
the worst happens. They take him by both hands, lead him across to the
table and all of them, every single one, line up, curious, in front of
the lamp. It's all very well for them: they're in the shadow; it's on
him alone the light falls as well as on all the disgrace of having a
face .

Will he stay and lie through his teeth about the general sort of life
they'd assigned to him? Will he stay and come to resemble them in
every part of his face? Can he divide himself between the tender
truthfulness of his will and the crude deceit that spoils it for him?
Will he abandon becoming something that might harm those of his family
who have nothing left but a weak heart? No, he'll go away. It could be
while they're busy with his birthday table, setting out those
ill-chosen items that are meant once again to put everything to
rights. He'll go away for good. Only long after will it become clear
to him how great had been his resolve at that time never to love, so
as not to put anyone in the appalling position of being loved. He will
be reminded of this years later and like other good intentions this
also will have been impossible to hold to. For in his loneliness, he
had loved and loved again, each time wasting his whole nature and
entertaining inexpressible fears for the freedom of the other person.
Slowly he had learnt to shine the rays of his emotion into his beloved
instead of consuming the emotion in her. And he was spoiled by the joy
of recognising through her growing transparency the vistas she opened
to his boundless urge to possess.

How he could weep night after night, yearning to be filled with light
himself. But a woman beloved, who yields, is still a long way from
being a woman who loves. the nights of desolation when the gifts
that had flooded from him were returned to him in pieces, heavy with
the passing of time. How often he thought then of the troubadors, who
feared nothing more than having their wishes granted. All the money he
had acquired and increased he gave away to avoid having that same
experience. He hurt her feelings with his ill-mannered payments,
afraid every day that she might try to answer his love. For he had
lost hope of ever meeting a woman whose love could pierce him.

Even when poverty terrified him every day with new hardships, when his
head was misery's favourite plaything and no longer any good, when
sores were breaking out all over his body like emergency eyes coping
with the blackness of affliction, when he was horrified at the filth
to which he'd been abandoned because he himself was filthy: even then,
when he thought about it, his greatest terror was that someone would
respond to him. What were all the hellish times since then compared
with the profound sorrow of those embraces in which he lost
everything? Didn't he wake up feeling he had no future? Didn't he walk
around with his mind vacant and without the right to all the dangers?

Hadn't he had to promise a hundred times not to die? Perhaps it was
the obstinacy of this terrible memory wanting a place in him to keep
coming back to, that allowed him to continue his life amid squalor.
Eventually he was found again. And not until then, not until his years
as a shepherd did his crowded past come to rest. Who can describe what
happened to him then? What poet's persuasion can reconcile the length
of those days with the brevity of life? What art has scope enough to
show simultaneously his thin cloaked form and the vast space of his
colossal nights?

That was the period which began with his feeling as ordinary and
anonymous as a convalescent making slow progress. He didn't love-
apart from, one could say: loving life. The simple love of his sheep
didn't affect him; like light falling through clouds, it was scattered
all about him and shimmered softly upon the meadows. Following in the
innocent trail of their hunger, he strode silently over the pastures
of the world. Strangers saw him on the Acropolis and for a long while
perhaps he was one of the shepherds at Les Baux and saw petrified time
outlasting that noble family, which, despite all their hard-won
victories under the numbers seven and three, was not able to defeat
the sixteen rays of its own stars. Or should I picture him at Orange,
resting against the rustic triumphal arch? Should I see him in the
soul-haunted shade of Alyscamps where among the tombs that lie open
like the tombs of the resurrected, his eyes pursue a dragonfly?

No matter. I see more than just him. I see his whole existence, which
was then taking up the long love to God, the silent goalless toil of
it. For he who had wanted to hold himself back forever was once more
overcome by the increasing inability of his heart to wish it
otherwise. And this time he hoped his wish would be granted. His
entire being that through his long solitude had become more foreseeing
and unwavering, promised him that He who now dominated his thoughts
knew how to love with a love that was penetrating and radiant. But
while he yearned to be loved at last so masterly, his emotion which
was accustomed to things far off, understood the utter remoteness of
God. There were nights when he had a mind to hurl himself into space
towards God; hours full of discovery when he felt strong enough to
dive back to the Earth and pull it up on the storm-tide of his heart.
He was like someone who hears a wonderful language and feverishly
resolves to write poetry in it. Still ahead of him lies the dismay he
will experience at how difficult the language is; he was unwilling at
first to believe that you could spend your whole life shaping your
fist trial sentence only to find they didn't make sense. He launched
himself into learning it like a runner starting a race, but the
denseness of what had to be surmounted slowed him down. Anything more
humiliating than this apprenticeship didn't bear thinking about. He
had found the philosopher's stone and now he was being forced to
ceaselessly convert the swiftly made gold of his good fortune into the
lumpen lead of patience. He who had adapted himself to space now
dragged hiself like a worm through crooked passageways without egress
or direction. Now that he was learning, with so much difficulty and
worry, to love, he was shown how careless and trivial all the love had
been which he'd supposed he'd achieved. How nothing could have come
from that kind of love because he hadn't begun to work on it and turn
it into a reality.

During those years great changes were taking place within him. Working
hard to draw close to God, he almost forgot Him; and all that he
perhaps hoped to attain in time was ' sa patience de supporter une
ame ' * The accidents of fate which people go by had long since
relinquished all meaning for him; and now even the spicy flavour
that's essential to pleasure and pain became for him pure and
nourishing. From the roots of his being grew a sturdy overwintering
plant of a fruitful joyousness. He was completely absorbed in being
master of what constituted his inner life. He wanted to leave nothing
out, for he had no doubt that his love resided in all of this and was
growing. Indeed his inner composure was so far-reaching that he
decided to make up for the most important of the things he had merely
endured. He thought mostly of his childhood, and the more calmly he
tried to picture it the more incomplete it seemed to have been. All
his memories of it had about them the vagueness of premonitions and

the fact that they were taken as past virtually put them in the
future. To really involve himself in all this once more was the reason
why this erstwhile stranger returned home. We don't know if he stayed
there: all we know is that he went back.

*(his) patience to put up with a soul

Those telling the story make an effort at this point to remind us
about the house as it was; for by then only a short time had elapsed,
only a small amount of measured time; everyone in the house would be
able to say how much. The dogs are grown old but they're still living.
Reportedy one of them howled. Everyone leaves what they're doing.
Faces appear at the windows, old faces and grown up faces, all of them
showing a touching likeness to faces remembered. And in one very old
face recognition bursts forth. Recognition? Is it really just
recognition?--Forgiveness . Forgiveness for what?--Love. My God: love.

He, the one they recognised, no longer thought--his mind being so
occupied--that love might still exist. With all that was happening at
the time it's understandable that the only thing they would tell of
later was what he did, the incredible action he performed, which no
one had seen before: the gesture of supplication, in which he threw
himself down before them, imploring them not to show love. Alarmed by
this and shaking they raised him to his feet. They interpreted his
impulsive behaviour in their own way, while at the same time forgiving
him. He must have found it indescribably liberating to find that
they'd all misunderstood him, despite his desperately explicit manner.
It was likely they'd let him stay. As the days passed he came to see
more clearly that the love they were so vain about and which they
secretly encouraged in one another did not affect him. He almost had
to smile at the trouble they took and it became obvious that their
concern for him could not amount to much.

What did they know about who he was? He was now so terribly difficult
to love, and he felt there was only the One who was capable of it. But
He was not yet willing.

End of the Notebooks